September « 2007

September 28, 2007

Workaround for iTunes podcast annoyance

Filed under: Music,Technology,personal — Dave @ 12:46 pm

When apple finally started supporting podcasting the implementation was so shoddy it felt like they were forced to support it but that they really really hated the format. Well, it’s taken apple, what, two years? and finally they’ve left it … still poorly implemented.

Of all the problems though, to me the biggest was, somehow they made podcasts downloaded from iTunes behave differently from podcasts downloaded through other mechanisms.

They created a special section in the menus for podcasts. But it didn’t trigger off any particular metadata (that was editable through iTunes) so I couldn’t take podcasts that didn’t come through iTunes and fix them up to appear there.

Ok, so podcasts downloaded from iTunes get to go into the new section and podcasts downloaded any other way just goes into the music pile. I guess that’s OK. Through smart play lists I can create my own list to hold my podcasts. They have their list and I have mine.

But wait, iTunes podcasts were showing up in my lists. As far as the smart play lists were concerned, iTunes podcasts were just like regular podcasts. Cool, I can just use one list, my smart play list to get at both iTunes and non-iTunes podcasts.

Denied! Although iTunes podcasts show up in the smart play lists, they can’t be played from there. (!?)

So if you had a smart play list that was limited to the 20 most recent podcasts and let’s say 3 of them were downloaded through iTunes, you’d see 20 tracks in iTunes and on the iPod, but when you started playing the list you’d see the counter said it was playing 1 of 17. Why? To serve us better I guess.

Ok, I guess I just have to subscribe to all my podcasts using the same mechanism. But wait! Not so easy because iTunes does not support opml files for either import or export. So I have to move them all by hand, one by one.

I moved all my subscriptions into Juice, which has it’s own issues but at least mp3 files which happen to be podcasts will behave like mp3 files with respect to play lists.

But how to I get all the old podcasts that I still have to listen to out of their special, iTunes only, resort menu?

I tried pulling the MP3s out of iTunes entirely and re-importing them but NO, iTunes still knew they were special and treated them that way. So clearly there was something about the files themselves.

I finally found out what that was.

When iTunes downloads a podcasts it adds a special extended tag ITUNESPODCAST=1, to the MP3. It doesn’t expose that tag through the iTunes interface, so you can’t change it easily. But using a tag editor such as MP3Tag you can find this tag and delete it, turning this “special” MP3 into a normal MP3 that obeys all of your finely crafted smart play lists

Oh, except smart play lists are now broken on my new iPod classic.

Damn!

Comments (2)

September 20, 2007

The spammer community LOVES my music!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Dave @ 12:09 pm

I mentioned sometime ago that I was working on a music podcast/blog. It’s almost ready to go. I’ve shown a few people for feedback but I’ve not widely announced it yet.

However, about a week ago, I started to receive comment spam, about one a day, all drug related. I have it set up so that comments are moderated unless it’s a commenter who’s been previously approved so no comment spam has actually appeared but they still come.

Spam is so cheap to send that I don’t suppose their lack of success in getting their ad on my site will ever deter them. Once they find a blog to spam it’s far cheaper to just keep spamming than it would be to check to see which sites are accepting the spam. So I imagine I’m stuck with it forever.

Still I feel a little freaked to have been “discovered”. The spammer community LOVES my music!

I wonder if there’s a way to change the comment link so that it’s easy for a person to see and access but spam bots would be confused?

Comments (0)

September 8, 2007

While I’m going through flickr

Filed under: personal — Dave @ 12:28 pm

I’ve always been amazed at the speed with which viewers would appear on pictures I uploaded to flickr. Sometimes, even late at night (I know it’s always noon somewhere) I’ll upload some photos and, as soon as the uploading is done, I’ll go look at the pictures to add them to a set or something and some pictures will already have viewers.

I don’t know how these viewers appear so quickly. Perhaps it’s just a sign of how huge flickr actually is.

I once posted some pictures of a couple friends of mine from the hessler street fair. Monday, I got back to work and I emailed her that the pictures were up there. She already knew. She said another friend of her’s had seen the picture and emailed her.

I typically put some kind of tags on my photos and I suppose many people have RSS feeds for certain tags. I wouldn’t be surprised that, after an event like hessler street fair, many people start looking for such pictures. I assume that’s how this happened.

I did solve a previous mystery related to viewers. Flickr allows you to see your photos ordered by number of views. I went to a party with a camera where most of the guests were very internet involved. I posted pictures of the party and sent the link to the invite list. Those pictures quickly became my most viewed by far.

Then, out of nowhere, a picture shot up way above the other pictures. It was a different picture from that same hessler street fair series. The weird thing is that there seemed to be absolutely nothing of interest in the picture. It was a random crowd shot. No one seemed particularly notable.

I’d link the picture here but, why give it more help?

Not only did it become my most viewed photo, but it continued to grow in views. Each week it lengthened it’s lead over the next most viewed. It’s now about triple the views of it’s next most viewed picture.

Eventually, I started googling for the name of the photo and I found that my picture was linked to from a fairly popular local blog. Mystery solved.

I assume most people come to pictures due to searches, especially tag searches. I don’t take a lot of overtly sexual pictures but I recently posted this picture of a poster that I saw on someone’s porch in Toronto.

Along with all the tags that went with the series of Toronto pictures I thought I would, partly as a joke, partly as an experiment, add the tag “Breasts”. Let’s see if that eventually moves up to my most viewed picture.