So, based on semi-popular demand, I’m going to be offering each week’s radio show for download.
It looks like i’ve done 32 shows in the time I’ve been back at KSCU and have functional recordings for 24 of them… roughly 100 hours of programming.
In the interest of making them as easy to work with as possible here are the parameters that i, and a few other people who were kind enough to consult on this, came up with.
1) Length: 1 file for each hour of the radio show rather than a single gigantic episode. There are lots of advantages to this. Space/portability being the primary one.
2) song titles: these are “enhanced” podcasts and contain chapters that include artist/title for each song.
3) annoying dj talking: some people like me talking, but i don’t. : ) rather than edit myself out i kept the talking in but opted against specific chapters for the talking bits. If you don’t wanna hear the talking you can skip to the next section pretty easily.
4) titling/sorting: the original plan was to just number the files 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever based on how long that show was. after some thought it made better sense to use the hour of the day. a positive side-effect of that is that if the show moves or if i substitute for somebody else it will be easy to keep track of. Once that was worked out then it became a question of needing to separate the individual weeks and have them sort properly…. the solution: Name them by date (year, month, date, time)
5) title length. i originally had “grimace’d reality” in the titles/album for each, but when i loaded episodes on my phone for testing the important part of the episode name was cut off ’cause the “grimace’d reality” bit was too long.
6) RSS feed. in order to maintain the proper order of the episodes (7am before 8am before 9am before 10am) the upload times had to be reversed (so 10am is “older” to the feed)
I thought i was going to go live with the podcast this week, but I want to do a bit more testing to make sure everything is working the way i want it to. the straight-download option is a bit wonky at the moment, but the podcast subscription model is working just fine.