Monthly Archive for October, 2004

More is better: the quintuple-neck guitar

Published on October 31, 2004 in music. 38 Comments


I remember when I saw my first double-neck guitar, I was really impressed. That seemed like a huge thing to have hanging from your neck. They became really popular in the Led Zeppelin, Yes and The Who era. The idea is to have 2 guitars handy, like a 6-string and a 12-string, or a bass and a guitar, a fretted and a fretless bass, or 2 guitars in a different tuning. But obviously it’s also one of those macho ‘size-matters’ things. The guitarist with the double-neck here is Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin.


There’s more, of course: e.g. Steve Vai has played the triple-neck heart-shaped monster you see on the side.

Today, triple neck guitars are still rare, because they’re huge, heavy, expensive and utterly pointless. They’re an obscene symbol of self-indulgence, like Missy Elliot’s Lamborghini bed, or Snoop’s jewel-encrusted crunk cup.
(from: Engadget)

King of the hill: the quintuple-neck guitar, used by Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen. That is: 36 strings (4 guitars and a 12 string). Respect!

How to Podcast with Blogger and SmartCast

Published on October 30, 2004 in podcast. 31 Comments

This is a step-by-step manual on how to create your own Podcast feed with Blogger and Feedburner SmartCast.
PRECONDITIONS:
A. you have already created the MP3 files (see podcastingnews.com on software for this)
B. you already have hosting for the MP3 files, i.e. the Mp3 files already have their URL that anyone can access (see podcast hosting on hosting providers).

  1. Create a new blog in Blogger: [your_podcast].blogpost.com
  2. Go to the Settings/Formatting page of your new blog
  3. Set ‘Show Link Field’ to Yes
  4. create a new Post, and put the MP3 file you want to podcast in the ‘Link’ field.
  5. Publish the post, and check the blog (the title of your post will be clickable and point to the MP3 file)
  6. At www.feedburner.com, burn the http://[your_podcast].blogpost.com/atom.xml
  7. Enable the ‘SmartCast’ option for this feed:
  8. Verify your feed on feedvalidator.org (just to be sure – the result should be “This is a valid RSS feed”).
  9. Enter the Feedburner RSS feed into your Podcast aggregator (here: Doppler)
  10. Let the Podcast aggregator update (in Doppler: push “Retrieve Now”): your MP3 file should download
  11. configure your aggregator to introduce the downloaded files into iTunes, Windows Media Player or whatever application you use

Good luck!

Delicious Library: no, we don’t like Microsoft

Published on October 27, 2004 in Apple. Closed

Delicious Library asks everyone to blog about them, but they are slightly more picky in who can actually access their site: they are unreachable for the tiny minority amongst us running Internet Explorer on Windows.

This website currently requires one of the following modern browsers:
(…)
Windows
Firefox
Netscape
Mozilla

What are they about? Pray you have an ‘acceptable’ browser and check it out!

(via BizStone)

Podcasting and Windows Media Agony (WMA)

Published on October 26, 2004 in podcast. 3 Comments

Thanks to Feedburner’s new SmartCast (see Podcasting with Blogger), I can now create a Podcast feed with Blogger. It works fine with MP3 files. Before I buy my portable MP3 player (iPod or Zen), I wanted to check out if it’s easy to podcast Windows Media files. The iPod does not support .WMA files, but if it turns out that they don’t integrate easily into podcasts anyway, that’s less of an issue.

Scenario 1: Windows Media Services aka Cougar
I’m a sucker for sampling trivia, and there now is a great program on Studio Brussels on ‘modern music’: De Sample Minds. Lots of fun music (including a weekly dose of the Beach Boys), ample background info on the technical and legal aspects of sampling from DJ Bobby Ewing and above all, they don’t take themselves too seriously. The only problem: it plays on Sunday afternoon and I’m never near a radio at that moment. However, they publish the program archive on-line in ASX/WMA format. So I could make a feed for that, right? I downloaded the .asx files (basically XML-based playlists) and retrieved the .wma references in them. The latter are hosted on wm.streampower.be, which is a Cougar/9.00.00.3372 server. ‘Cougar’, that’s the Windows Media Services (not the most compatible of servers, as will be revealed).

  • 1st try: Sample Minds in Webjay. The Cougar server does not support HTTP HEAD, which Webjay uses to check if the URL actually exists. So the links all look ‘dead’ and do not get included into the auto-generated playlist. The ‘enclosures’ in the Podcast feed cannot be downloaded by iPodder and Doppler, presumably because the Cougar server does extra checks like verifying UserAgent, HttpReferer and consumed bandwidth. When it detects an unusual downloader, it just returns a audio/x-ms-wax file that references Ref1=http://(server)/(path)/(file).wma?MSWMExt=.asf.
  • 2nd try: Sample Minds in Blogger: I convert the ATom feed with the new FeedBurner SmartCast, but because HTTP HEAD does not work, the link looks dead to FeedBurner and do not get included into the RSS feed. But even if they would be included, no files would be downloaded (judging by the experience with Webjay).
  • 3rd try: and this one works, but it is not a Podcast: SampleMinds in ASX playlist. But it only works for streaming, not for downloading.

Scenario 2: ‘Normal’ webserver (like IIS)
Let’s see what happens with .WMA files on my own webserver. I’ve included some in the SmoothPod blog. Again Feedburner SmartCast converts the Atom feed to an RSS Podcast feed and, lo and behold, it works! The WMA files are detected, converted into a perfect
<enclosure url="http://www.smoothouse.org/smoothouse/media/hardwork.wma" length="4190342" type="audio/x-ms-wma" />
which is picked up by Doppler without a problem.

Conclusion:
WMA files delivered from a ‘normal’ webserver should cause no problem. Podcasting with WMA files from a Windows Media Services server will probably not work.