Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

Occasionally, the ABC have items on their programs to which they don’t have the copyright for, and as such they cannot post an MP3 of the program, but will do a Real Audio stream. Meaning you have to use Real Audio to listen to it, and you cannot archive it.

Or so it seems. Now, I refuse to use Real Audio: it’s nothing to do with commercial software or anything like that (there is after all a free version), but I just don’t like streaming. I find that on dialup it just doesn’t work well. And, the time I spend at the computer I am generally reading, so listening to anything other than music just doesn’t work well. I much rather listen to Podcasts while commuting.

So, how do you get an item into your iTunes Podcast library?
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I use a “Rating is no stars” playlist, but it seems to pick up the tracks rated 1-19 as well. I’m not surprised, in the light of my recent article on the relative play counts of various rated tracks.

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OmniNerd - Articles: Extended iTunes Rating

iTunes has the ability to store ratings of a finer gradient than just the number of stars. Higher rated tracks should be played more, but is this always the case? I needed to know the answer to this.

This is the long-awaited article I wrote for OmniNerd, expanding on the results I obtained in my ratings research and experiment using iTunes.

Well worth the read, if I do say so myself!

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My biggest hate about iTunes is that if the download of a Podcast fails, it needs to restart the whole download, rather than just resume. This really sucks if you are 21Mb into a 22.5Mb download.

Using the technique illustrated in Adding a Podcast to a Pre-Existing Subscription, it’s possible to download the files in another program, such as wget, which can handle resumes. It also tends not to drop out as much as iTunes does when the network is congested. Which it is automatically when three downloads are concurrently occurring.

There are some changes that need to be made to the process, but these are really just simplifications. You need to know the URL of the file you want to get, which can be obtained using the following AppleScript:

tell application "iTunes"
    set the clipboard to address of item 1 of selection
end tell

Then, set up your http server, and create the same directory structure from your server root. Go to the relevant directory, and download the files you want to grab.

Finally, go offline, and point the domain(s) at your own computer. Go back into iTunes, and use the GET button to grab the files from your own ’server’. Don’t use the Update Podcasts button, or an error may occur.

This removes the need to recreate the XML file, which is the most labour intensive part of the process illustrated in the previous post. It works a treat.

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