I’m writing a program to copy my podcasts and mp3 files to my player. Copying is not a big deal, but I have funny ideas about how to do it.
Before I tried writing a program I would pick them by hand and copy them to my player. That was clearly for the birds. I don’t need to spend 1/2 hour picking my songs and programs each day or even each week. It’s too much.
I started by collecting up all the files and then pulling them by random selection, but that left a lot to be desired. Some of the podcasts are series. I don’t want to hear the episodes out of order. Then there are some that are long, and having them chosen twice in the same month is too much. I end up skipping them, and it wastes space for stuff I want to hear.
I tried to work it out by file date, but it’s not really related to anything but when I retrieve files. When I subscribe to a new series, I really don’t want to listen to all 7 episodes I just downloaded in order of retrieval. I want them to “merge into the flow” with all the other programs I have. Especially if they’re talk programs (engadget, buzz, etc).
So I figure that I should write a program to deal with my complex “needs”. It needs rules.
- I don’t want two files from the same series, so I need to group by series
- Within a series, I want the oldest file that I’ve not already heard
- I want to be sure I get a file from each time-sensitive program if possible
- Once I get the time-sensitive stuff, I want to fill with non-time-sensitive stuff
- I want to get as much as possible on my player each time
- I just want to click a button and have it “happen”. I don’t want to be involved
Guess what? This is really hard when podcasts don’t have their ID3 tags filled in. I’m writing all kinds of silly “fall-back” algorithms to try to figure out what series and episode and date I’m dealing with. What I would love to see is consistent use of “ALBUM”, “TRACKNUMBER”, “YEAR” and “ARTIST”.
- ALBUM: the podcast
- YEAR: the podcast year if possible. That would be *this* year if you’re making new ones
- TRACK NUMBER: either an index for this year, or for all time. Either is fine
- ARTIST: if you have a guest or are rebroadcasting, this is handy. If you broadcast OTR, then “The Shadow” is a fine artist name. This way, I can group all of The Shadow broadcasts and file them through in order, and can treat “Fibber McGee and Molly” separately.
If you are broadcasting sermons, a similar scheme is much recommended. ALBUM would be your church, and ARTIST would be the minister. The others are unchanged.
If you don’t care to help by doing consistent tagging, then please try to use a good filename convention. I personally like the ALBUM-EPISODE-YYYY.MM.DD format. I can parse it and work with it rather well. Please don’t add extra separators or the like. And please don’t use US (MM/DD/YY) or European (DD/MM/YYYY) date formats or anything else clever. The thing I’m shooting for here is that the titles should sort well.
It would be easier yet if you were to use YYYY.MM.DD-ALBUM-EPISODE so that the names sort naturally.
Of course, that’s all a fallback position. I don’t care how you name or number your episodes if you will give me good ID3 tags. Dr Dan Hayden (a word from the Word) does a wonderful job. C/Net buzz stinks at it. Ravi Zacharius (just thinking) does a good job. IT Conversations stinks at it. Charles Hodgson (podictionary) is wonderful. Slashdot review stinks out loud.
It is funny to me that the ones that are best at using ID3 tags are the ones that are non-technical!! Is that bizarre? The educational and theological podcasts are leading the way in intelligent and consumer-friendly ID3 tags, while techy podcasts are seriously trailing. It’s crazy.