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Music Tech Stupid Tricks
Introduction: As I’m a Apple Mac user, and have one o’ dem fancy dancy iPods, I just had to check out this podcasting craze. Not all that I hoped it would be. I know there’s a lot of people that love talk shows, and they can be interesting, but I’ve never been much of a talk radio person (I can’t stand a lot of DJ’s and their over-inflated opinions!). Plus, only the people with lots of cash to give away to the RIAA can make even music previews, so we’re seeing a lot of local music from around the world, which rarely interests me (I’ve only heard a few local artists that I’d like!)
This is the crux of my observations; since it’s now possible for anyone to create their own podcasts, and the learning curve in creating XML files for RSS syndication is low to middling, it opened the door for: 1) AAC (.m4a) sound file formats to become increasingly popular, since AAC is used to make enhanced podcasts (images and chapters) which you can’t do with the .mp3/.wav/.wma format and 2) doing what I just did with the special gems in my collection. Let me explain below…
… I have the first side of comedian Steven Wright’s “I Have A Pony” in a large .mp3 file. It’s great comedy, but what’s annoying about having a 48 minute sound file is having to scroll through it all just to locate a particular section. Well, enhanced podcasts can have chaptering enabled. This enables the listener to skip to pre-defined sections in that one file. I took that file, converted it to AAC format (roughly the same size file), and used a chaptering program to break it up into chapters, then had the program compile the chaptered version of the track. Then, I put it into my webserver file, created a XML file for iTunes to recognize as a podcast, then told iTunes to download the track from the computer… back into the computer!! The reason for this last step was to enable the chapter titles to show on the iPod interface. It won’t show them unless it’s been downloaded as a podcast.
It may seem like quite a bit of work, but it worked beautifully, and I’ll only create these enhanced files in special circumstances. I did all this later on with Dream Theater’s 23 minute long magnum opus “A Change Of Seasons”, a piece made up of seven parts. Also, before writing this, I ripped my copy of Queensrÿche’s “Operation: LIVEcrime” live album, which is an hour long (the AAC file weighs in at 59 MB’s), and chaptered it into 17 chapters and podcasted that one as well. It’s most beneficial doing this with a live album, since listening to the album as individual tracks on any .mp3 player disrupts the live feel, because the player always has that slight pause before the next track! NOTE: only iTunes (so far) can read AAC (.m4a) files. Luckily there is a version of iTunes for Windows users, so they don’t have to miss out on the enhanced podcast fun!
P.S.: The other good thing about doing this to live albums (having them all as one file, one chaptered track) is that, if you have whatever music player you’re using on “shuffle” mode, you don’t have to shut off that mode just to listen to a live performance in it’s entirety. Whee!! Next on my list: Live Rush concerts!
