Developer 2.0 ARCast

FYI, I sat down for an ARCast with Ron Jacobs last month to talk about Developer 2.0. It's not he full presentation I did at the p&p summit, but it covers much of the same ground. Catch the show over on Channel 9.

Podcast Software Still Pretty Rudimentary

So I'm experimenting with this podcasting stuff. I started by listening to a few podcasts - primarily Daily Source Code and Mike's Manic Minute - and using Doppler to pull these down to my Zen Micro. But then I started expanding out a bit - adding Ron Jacobs and Major Nelson - and I started to hit issues w/ the software. Of course, not everyone tags their podcasts with the same metadata style. Given the way the Zen Micro works, I want all the podcasts to have the same genre (i.e. "Podcast") and then have either one song per "album" where the album has the date in the title (preferably in the yyyymmdd format for sort purposes) or one album per artist where the song has the date in the title. That way I can see all the shows from a given podcaster on my Zen Micro in a list and can easily determine the oldest and newest shows. Doppler supports tag overriding for downloaded podcasts - i.e. so I can set them all to have the genre "Podcast". However, their "smarttags" implementation doesn't work at all. You're supposed to use smart tags like %date% and %album% in the tag overrides, if they worked that is. And even the hard coded genre override doesn't work for WMA files. I assume Doppler is using an MP3 specific library for modifying the metadata tags, rather than the Windows Media libraries that work with both. I assume these will get fixed as the tools get better. In the meantime, I've subscribed to the MP3 versions of Ron and Major Nelson's podcast feeds.

Update - Doppler tag overriding doesn't seem to work for the hardcoded genre either.

patterns And practices And podcasts

Ron from patterns & practices is not only blogging and webcasting but also podcasting. He's got two podcasts up so far. The first is a discussion with Billy Hollis about smart client architectures. It's pretty short - just enough to whet your appetite. (Quick plug - Billy is presenting with Rocky on Smart Client Architecture as part of the TechEd 2005 ARC track.) Ron's second podcast is with Scott Densmore on EntLib's ConfigurationContext. It's cool stuff, but it's alot harder to follow (for me anyway) topics related to code like this with just audio. Luckily, Scott blogged about this as well.

Another Zen Micro Feature Request

The other day, I wished my Zen Micro supported variable speed playback for podcast playback. I've got another feature request, this time for podcast recording. The Zen Micro features include built in microphone and support for voice recording. But there doesn't appear to be any way to hook up an external microphone. The built-in mic is fine for leaving messages for yourself, but it's not high enough quality for podcasting "on the go". Additionally, since I'm using WMP 10 instead of the app that comes with the Zen Micro, I'm not sure there's any way to sync the recorded files back down to my PC, but I'm thinking that's just a matter of geting Notmad Explorer talking to my Zen Micro.

UPDATE - Sometime shortly after I blogged this, Adam curry posted an episode of DSC recorded on a Zen Micro that Sean gave him. I haven't had a chance to listen yet, but I'm interested in how it sounds and how well it worked for Adam. Do you have to hold it near your mouth the whole time? I still wish I could use an external mic.