Archive for the 'podcast' Category

If this is true, it could change the landscape for podcasting significantly: Apple is jumping on the podcast wagon:

Steve Jobs just revealed at the D: All Things Digital Conference that iTunes 4.9 will add support for podcasts. With one click you’ll be able to subscribe to different feeds and have them automatically delivered to your iPod without using a third-party app like iPodder. Youll be able to search through a directory of available podcasts (producers will be able to register their podcasts with the iTunes Music Store), but users will have the option of adding whatever feeds they want to iTunes. The other big news: Jobs says that he would consider selling podcasts through the iTunes Music Store, something which should have Audible just a little worried.
(from Engadget – also on oreilly.com and sixapart.com)

Some reflections:

• there should be a big impact on the market of commercial podcast clients like iPodderX (for Mac). Why pay for something that ships right out of the box in iTunes?
• The .Net based, Windows-only Doppler still has a lot of bells and whistles that iTunes probably won’t have in the beginning, but they should focus on support for all things non-Apple: Windows Media Player and maybe RealPlayer, WMA, Ogg-Vorbis audio formats (and maybe conversion), mobile phones and PDAs, …
• the Python based iPodder software loses some of its attraction: iTunes is also cross-platform. I don’t think iTunes will build in BitTorrent support soon, but that is a minor Unique Selling Proposition. They probably have to do the same as Doppler: go broader than Apple.
• selling podcasts through iTunes … That is one step closer to allowing people to sell music straight from musician to the end-user, bypassing record companies and record stores. So wouldn’t Amazon be interested to be in this game too?
• will Apple do some kind of screening of the content? I can not imagine an American public company providing a directory where anyone can say just anything, First Amendment or not. So there will probably be a special iTunes podcast directory, with a Code of Conduct to be signed before inclusion, and any complaint about illegal music (mashups?), blasphemy, four-letter words or politically incorrect opinions will get you thrown out.
• what about podcast hosting? If Apple wants to make a buck selling podcasts, they can sure make money hosting the content. They have the experience hosting media for the Apple trailers and iTunes Music store, access to cheap hardware (for them anyway) and bandwidth and experience with micro-payment. Or can they find a business model where they host for free (but with a higher quality level than the idisk.mac.com service) in exchange for something else?
• will Microsoft do something similar? Build podcast support into Windows Media Player? It would make a lot of sense: with WMA, they own the only audio format that is a worthy competitor for MP3 (basically only Apple’s iPod players do not support it). And maybe a podcast plugin for the MSN Spaces service?
• will Google do something with podcasts? An modified version of Blogger with better podcast support (provide RSS feeds, god forbid)? Provide media hosting in exchange for searching the content and meta-data?

Technorati: podcast

I have a Sony MP-40 car radio that reads CDs with MP3 files. However, since I started using iTunes to create my MP3 CDs, I sometimes seem to lose the ID3 tags (Title/ Artist/ Album). I now know why: iTunes writes ID3v2 tags, and the Sony only handles ID3v1 (MP40 PDF).
Main differences:

• ID3v1 tags are written in a 128 byte fixed-length field at the end of the audio file.

  Song title 30 characters
  Artist     30 characters
  Album      30 characters
  Year        4 characters
  Comment    30 characters
  Genre       1 byte

• ID2v2 can accommodate variable length tags, and allows storing them at the beginning and/or the end of the file.

  +-----------------------------+
  |      Header (10 bytes)      |
  +-----------------------------+
  |       Extended Header       |
  | (variable length, OPTIONAL) |
  +-----------------------------+
  |   Frames (variable length)  |
  +-----------------------------+
  |           Padding           |
  | (variable length, OPTIONAL) |
  +-----------------------------+
  | Footer (10 bytes, OPTIONAL) |
  +-----------------------------+

There are advantages for both systems:

• prepending the ID3 info (add it in the beginning of the file) is essential for non-random access (e.g. streaming) and low bandwidth situations. You want to display the information as fast as possible, before the music starts playing.
• appending the ID3 data (add it at the end of the file) makes it easier to edit. If you have a 50MB music podcast, and you change the Album/Artist info (which is necessary in a lot of cases, the authors don’t always pay attention to good tagging – thank god Doppler can do this automatically), in a lot of cases the whole file has to be rewritten, and this takes several seconds.

iTunes actually does the most sensible thing: it prepends ID3v2 tags and uses the ‘padding’ to reserve about 1,6 KB of space. So if new ID3 info has to be added, it can take some of the place reserved by the padding and iTunes only needs to change the first 1,6KB of the file, and leave the rest untouched. This combines the advantages of appending and prepending.

The default location of an ID3v2 tag is prepended to the audio so that players can benefit from the information when the data is streamed. It is however possible to append the tag, or make a prepend/append combination.
(from id3.org)

Until I change my car stereo, my only option is to change the ID3 format of my files before I burn them to a MP3 CD. iTunes can do this (the ‘Advanced’/'Convert ID3 tags’ option), but it’s still a drag.