The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Here that is in Bloglines feedreader:

roymond wrote:Here that is in Bloglines feedreader:

Yeah, hm, not quite right from a semantics point of view. Any idea of how to Songfight fit into the RSS model better? After all, the channel isn't changing its name for each title, and the title of the song is not the same thing as the artist...

Probably could do it like "Song Fight: Rule of Thump" and title "Abecedarian"

Yeah, and we'd prolly want to use permalinks rather than the current fight colors.

That's kind of a bad shoehorning though.

Maybe it'd work better to just have a single RSS feed for all four fights, and just one enclosure which is a .torrent to all the songs. That'd also help with bandwidth issues as well.

fluffy wrote:That's kind of a bad shoehorning though.

Maybe it'd work better to just have a single RSS feed for all four fights, and just one enclosure which is a .torrent to all the songs. That'd also help with bandwidth issues as well.

Yes. Torrent works well with this, apparently. Would definately help.

well, i'm not prepared to have an extra zipped copy of the songs sitting on the server if that's what it takes to torrent them. disk space is more precious to me than bandwidth right now.

We have been talking about having an RSS feed for a bit though, so I will peruse the suggestions above. Seems like a better way to go. Any further thoughts post them here, cuz I'm gonna do something soon...

You don't need an extra zipped copy for the torrent. A torrent can reference an entire directory.

Huh? Torrents don't make any sense unless iPodder or whatever RSS reader knows how to fetch torrents (I'm assuming it doesn't). And even then, it's just another unnecessary step. The whole point of podcasting is simplicity for the end user - the SongFight songs magically show up on your iPod without you needing to do anything.

iPodder doesn't, but <a href="http://azureus.sf.net/">Azureus</a> does - it's a BitTorrent client with an embedded RSS scraper (actually two to choose from). I use it to subscribe to legaltorrents.com's music section, as well as a few other sources of media.

fluffy wrote:iPodder doesn't, but <a href="http://azureus.sf.net/">Azureus</a> does - it's a BitTorrent client with an embedded RSS scraper (actually two to choose from). I use it to subscribe to legaltorrents.com's music section, as well as a few other sources of media.

If iPodder doesn't support it, it seems like a non-issue. It'd be like a band releasing all their music clips in the Ogg Vorbis format but not MP3. It might be technically superior, but your visitors aren't going to jump through hoops to do it.

Podcasting is obscure enough as it is - the number of people who would go to the hassle of using a more obscure torrent-supporting podcasting client could probably be counted on one hand. Or one finger.

It's not as if this would generate enough bandwidth to make this a concern. MP3s good. Torrents bad.

I bet there's more Azureus users out there than iPodder users.

Anyway, no reason they couldn't provide TWO feeds.

There are torrent-friendly Podcast clients. But I agree, that right now it's not a big deal. I thought that torrents only really make sense under two conditions: there's a large demand for large files. If either condition isn't there then more granular/direct download methods do the job better. But I'm not familiar with torrenting directories and whether that changes anything.

Anyway, iPodder does support torrents, which I found with a 30-second Google search. Read up on it first, plsthx. (That was directed more at me than Josh.)

Torrenting directories makes a huge difference - a torrent of a 100MB directory has the same savings etc. as a torrent of a 100MB file. The torrent treats the directory as one big file, essentially (it's not one separate seed per file or anything).

The IndieFeed is a model of how this thing can work. There can be a feed for each of the colors and a master one that covers everything (color blind). IndieFeed delivers a bunch of songs everyday but SF would only deliver on the release date for each fight, plus late comers (those where the links were screwed up or when June swears he sent it...) would be delivered the next time podcatchers sync the feed automatically. Oh, and it would be sans-intros, obviously.

podcasting being embraced by mainstream media.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... CGGLH1.DTL

http://www.kyouradio.com/

Yeah, isn't that a hoot? Saw that this morning. So cool that podcasting can swim upstream, too. Not sure how long that will last but it's a brilliant idea.

With Roymond's help, I put together an experimental "Songfight! Current Fights" podcast feed. I've been sitting on it for a while, and it seems to work:

Basically, you add the feed's URL to your podcast client (e.g. iPodder). Then whenever iPodder checks for updates, it'll download the latest Songfight! songs that are up for voting.

What's cool: you can rate them in iTunes, they are ID3-tagged so you easily know the artist and song title, and they download automagically so your right-clicking finger can take a break. Each song is still a separate file and retains its original bitrate.

What's not cool: ID3-tagged artwork is NOT included, no unique intros/narrative bits are added to the feed, and the feed's XML might not conform to RSS specs (this is unverified).

Obligatory disclaimers: This is experimental, and could break/disappear at any time. It is not an official service, and is not endorsed by songfight.org. To avoid typo issues and accommodate late entries, the new songs might not appear on the podcast feed until several hours after they are released to the official site. Feel free to PM me if you notice a problem or run into errors.

Apple On Board: Podcasting Turf Battle Heats Up

The competition to be the podcasting portal-of-choice has just gained a new player. Apple says it will release a new version of its iTunes media player that will support finding, filtering and synchronizing MP3 files with an iPod player. The new version of iTunes is reportedly due in about 60 days.

Apple is awesome for supporting RSS.

I wonder if this means they'll support BitTorrent too.

Plat,

Thanks for setting this up! I love it!!