Quasi-Ipodding...

The post election funk is lifting (its been a pretty bad week in general), part of the credit goes to Xiaoqing, she actually asked for my blog URL (that would take my known reader count up to a grand total of... 2). So I thought I would write a bit about things (other than tyrannical presidents) to take my mind off things.

Anywho, I have found a few feeds that I like, the only quirk I am having now is figuring out how to make ipodder not re-download a feed if I have already downloaded it once (then moved it to my iRiver MP3 player).

The “quasi” part comes into play with NPR, who doesn't have ipod audio feeds (and probably won't since many of their shows are being sold on places like iTunes). I am an NPR addict, who has been going through withdraw. I can’t get it here in Rome (without the European equivalent to XM) so that leaves me with listening to it online. Online wouldn’t be so bad but ipodder has kind of raised the bar so now (more than before) I really want to be able to listen to it on my MP3 player.

Since most of the feeds are in Realplayer or Windows Media format so I can’t just copy them so I have to use other means... there are apparently lots of programs out there that seem to be capable of doing this but when you want something that can do scheduling that tends to narrow it down quite a bit. I managed to narrow it down to Replay Radio and Total Recorder. Replay seemed to work ok (had a pre-made list of radio shows too!) but cost more than I was willing to pay ($30! Com’on guys, throw me a bone, like $10-$15 then I would totally get it). So I looked at Total Recorder Pro, it has a ton more features for the same price; ok that might work. I tried it out, it has a billion features/options, great for the techno-weenie/power user, but when I set it up to record every broadcast I got, 1 minute into the show, this crazy mad static, not sure if it is like macrovision for online broadcasts or what but it rendered every broadcast un-listenable.

Back to the drawing board, Ugh.

The broadcast that I tried was my hometown public radio/NPR station WFAE and they streamed using the windows media, perhaps if I can find an MP3 stream then I wouldn't have this problem. I posted something to that effect on a few news groups on Usenet (using Google Groups), hopefully someone will have some ideas.