Richard Lynch wrote:
This question is not PHP-specific, really, but is a general high-level sort of programming/design question, and it's being written in PHP, so I guess it's as on-topic as most of what's here... Do feel free to hit delete now if you're a purist. I have an ongoing daily music playlist of 30 songs: http://uncommonground.com/radio_hifi.m3u http://uncommonground.com/radio_lofi.m3u hifi and lofi, obviously [aside] Playlists may differ slightly at the request of the artists to [not] publish hi/lo fi of their material. [/aside] I'm trying to shoe-horn that into an Apple Podcast.
You hit the nail on the head. What you have is not a podcast as far as Apple and most of the industry defines it, so shoe-horning is right.
If you really want to release it in a podcast-type format, I think your best bet is to roll them up into a single daily MP3. Yes you'll lose the individual tags, but you can associate each feed entry with a webpage (commonly called the shownotes) where you can provide the full ID3 tags for each individual source file and you'll have control over the order.
-Stut
First, let me say up-front, that technologically-speaking, this is turning out to be not a really good fit, even though I thought it would be a no-brainer... Apple podcasts are designed for longer single-theme MP3s, and, as some of my dilemnas below will show, for far less content than I'm producing. However, from a business / political perspective, I'm (still) wanting to do this, mainly because I've had too many people tell me I should do this. So no matter how wrong they all are, there is a time to cave in to popular opinion :-) :-) :-) Apple podcasts allow up to 100 items, and are sequenced by DATE only, afaict, in iTunes. Apple podcasts only allow a tiny fraction of mime-types in their podcast, and an m3u (mp3 playlist) is not one of them. I could "smush" all 30 MP3s for a day into one big MP3, but we're talking a HUGE MP3, and I'd lose the ID3 tag info I've got for each individual MP3, which I'm loathe to do. I could, in theory, switch to Apple's AAC format to get playlist-like stop-points or somesuch, but A) it's proprietary, and B) I've got 65,000+ MP3s for ~400 GIG, and duplicated on a second server, all out of my pocket, so converting is not attractive. So, effectively, I'm limited to 3.333 days' worth of programming: 30 "episodes" per day, 100 episode limit. And I can't even sequence the playlist of 30 episodes in one day so that iTunes will play them in order. They all were selected the same day, and iTunes re-orders them willy-nilly. :-( [aside] I have to see if the resolution is better than day, but worse than seconds, as maybe changing the "minute" or "hour" on each song/episode will maintain order. Haven't tested yet. [/aside] What's worse, is that there doesn't seem to be any easy way in the 100-episode limit to indicate the wealth of content available far beyond the 100 songs. It's a long shot, but I'm hoping somebody here has some insight that might engender some kind of attractive solution that I'm missing. Thanks for any thoughts on this, and I sure appreciate you taking the time to read this!
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