Re: High-Level Design Question, Podcast, Playlists, Content-Rich

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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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