The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Browsing for podcasts on my BRAND NEW IMAC and of course the first thing I typed in was Songfight, and I was happy to see something there, called "Songfight! Latest Fights" It had all the songs, though no spoken commentary, alas. In fact, it looked pretty automated, which made me think it was fightmaster-built. However, the latest fights on there were Adonai and Galaxies Floating. Whatever happened to the podcast?

Jim of Seattle wrote:...BRAND NEW IMAC...

Gabba gabba we accept you we accept you one of us...

It'd be pointlessly interesting to know how many people on the campus (is that what they call where you're at?) are dual platform. Aside from thems in the Mac development section, I mean.

Oh, and congrats on the new beast!

I am duel platform, but I only do my music stuff on my PC.

I didn't even realise there was a podcast. If it started up again, it would be cool if a different person did each one, introducing the songs and maybe giving their thoughts.

Or not. Its a lot of work, and frankly, who can be fucked?

I'd do a podcast.

STREAM ALL <- podcast.

Plat set up the iTunes podcast and he never said he'd maintain it, but he did really well for quite a while. It provides a brilliant method for automated downloads of each song, each fight. He also tweaked the ID3 tags nicely in the process. It would be great for fightmasters to create the template, afterwhich it would be a hands-off behind the scenes situation.

Streaming doesn't do you any good for portability, and in many cases it in effect downgrades the quality, as listening to a stream off your computer is not like listening off a good player or your stereo. But I do realize many people listen to music off their machine. In little earbuds. Or those holes they call speakers.

The beauty is that these podcasts don't require anyone to do anything but produce their song as they have all along. And it doesn't require an iMac, or even iTunes to receive podcasts. Any computer, on any platform has podcast-friendly RSS clients (OK, I'm sure somebody's out there with some crapass old lunker machine that won't run 2 year old apps).

sausage boy wrote:I am duel platform

Pistols AND rapiers?!
-bill

<a href="http://johnorama.com/songs/freaky_feelin.mp3">ahem, it's "gooble gobble" not "gabba gabba".</a>

6 responses, 1 actual answer to the question. About the average for the SF boards, I'd say. Thanks roymond.

And for the record, within the steely blue walls of MS, there is no shame or apologies around someone getting a Mac. The usual response is "Cool! Which one? Aren't they great? Man, I wish we were making those. What's the matter with us?"

But now that we've been dating for a week or two, I've come to realize that under all the pretty UI and marketing bluster about how friendly the thing is, it's really just another computer with a (very slightly) different set of rules to follow. Still, it's pretty sweet.

I won't be using it for music, not because I don't want to, but because the whole point of the thing is for family use, which means not tucked away in my office.

It would not be that hard to have the rss feed automatically generated at update time. I will look into it.

SPUD

roymond wrote:as listening to a stream off your computer is not like listening off a good player or your stereo. But I do realize many people listen to music off their machine. In little earbuds. Or those holes they call speakers.

Of course some of us have decent audio systems hooked up to their computers. Especially those of us running our music production off of a computer and who have decent monitoring.

Jim of Seattle wrote: But now that we've been dating for a week or two, I've come to realize that under all the pretty UI and marketing bluster about how friendly the thing is, it's really just another computer with a (very slightly) different set of rules to follow. Still, it's pretty sweet.

Well duh. The thing is that the rules are more enduser-friendly and the innards aren't so prone to corruption. Plus it comes with a hell of a lot more creativity software. (Have you tried GarageBand yet? I also love iPhoto. iMovie is kind of a joke though (but it's still way better than MS Movie Maker), and I haven't gotten around to trying iDVD yet.)

Were those podcasts all the songs as a single mp3? That sounds weird and hard to deal with.
-bill

IIRC, Plat just made an RSS feed which downloaded everything off the Songfight servers. Any id3-tagging fixing was probably done by the podcast aggregator, many of which correct id3 tags on podcasts (though iTunes doesn't, and it can be kinda inconsistent about which set of data gets displayed particularly when an iPod is in the mix).

HeuristicsInc wrote:Were those podcasts all the songs as a single mp3? That sounds weird and hard to deal with.
-bill

yes, and yes.

blue wrote:

HeuristicsInc wrote:Were those podcasts all the songs as a single mp3? That sounds weird and hard to deal with.
-bill

yes, and yes.

Actually, No and yes. But No.

Those podcasts delivered all songs individually. With clean metadata.

roymond wrote:

blue wrote:

HeuristicsInc wrote:Were those podcasts all the songs as a single mp3? That sounds weird and hard to deal with.
-bill

yes, and yes.

Actually, No and yes. But No.

Those podcasts delivered all songs individually. With clean metadata.

point me to these magical casts of pod! i thought all podcasts were in a single file.

this links to iTunes where you can see the individual songs. I don't know Plat's RSS feed URL. But here's mine, doing much the same thing. Each song has its own "enclosure" tag. The songfight podcast simply creates new entries on the same day, so your feed client sees them all as new and will download them.

Ah, well, that is cool then. Carry on.
-bill

jb wrote:<a href="http://johnorama.com/songs/freaky_feelin.mp3">ahem, it's "gooble gobble" not "gabba gabba".</a>

Heh, I was quoting The Ramones' "Pinhead". But thanks for the link. Fun stuff.

So it appears that we could put several songs into a feed. This brings up an organizational issue.

Should we make it one fight per feed, or the entire week's efforts?

SPUD

personally i don't know the first thing about podcasts or feeds or streams or whatever. but i think it makes more sense to separate by fight. i think lumping all three together could be overwhelming to the casual listener, and anybody who cares enough to go through *everything* could probably be bothered to do it in three steps.

Spud wrote:So it appears that we could put several songs into a feed. This brings up an organizational issue.

Should we make it one fight per feed, or the entire week's efforts?
SPUD

<thinkingoutloud>You could create one per feed and also a complete one. Since it's automated, and they're just little text files. Problem is the individual fights have different names, that change occassionally, which is great. But if you create a Zebra feed, and next week it's CMYK...</thinkingoutloud> OK, one master feed.