Podcast client?? (warning, musical OVERKILL, don't click if you have work to do)

[moerl]

I ignored podcasts for a while... but today I made some ground-breaking, life-changing discoveries on the web. Here's what started it all: http://pcworld.com/n.../0,aid,123539,00.asp
That led to the discovery of this: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/, an excellent independent music review site. They have a great best of the year album section as well. I bookmarked it instantly and am waiting for when I have time to check it all out.
Somewhere along the way I came across this: http://www.listal.com/. I haven't signed up or used it yet because I was busy discovering music and going nuts like that. But if you guys try it, let me know how it is. Another thing I found just the other day is here: http://www.pandora.com/ -- interesting, not sure how useful. Check it out and see.

And then came the bomb... ironically, I don't even have a clue where I found it now, but I was captivated by it. But here it is, my currently favorite MP3 music blog: http://aurgasm.us/. My recommendations for that page...

- Curumin
- Arctic Monkeys
- Tin Hat Trio
- Hanne Hukkelberg
- Antje Duvekot

Varying styles but all great stuff. You may agree or disagree of course... but once you're done reading this thread, there is no way you will not have found something you like.

Here's another great, random link: http://www.informati...e_top_40_band_2.html (tip: the first two links in the text, in case you don't bother reading the intro part, link you to the 2003 and 2004 version of the same page)

I added Aurgasm to my Thunderbird and went through all of the entries on there, only to be sucked in and magically transformed by the world of beautiful, yet undiscovered music.
As I was listening, I started checking out other MP3 blogs, something I wasn't even aware existed... and I found so many that my head is about to explode. Here's an excellent way to prevent that from happening: http://hype.non-standard.net/

Now what I've been doing so far is this. I add the feed to Thunderbird, had Internet Download Manager (best download manager ever IMHO) detected Thunderbird as an application that downloads files (and then turned the feature back off in IDM). I set a default folder up called "Blog Music" and now every time I right-click and hit "save as" in Thunderbird with the MP3 files being blogged about... IDM kicks in and grabs the file ridiculously fast and puts them in that mentioned folder. It works great. Just since I discovered all this tonight, I made a playlist of 41 songs, (current), all full of free, beautiful music. And it's constantly growing . I use QMP to play music files and have it set to "only" append songs to the playlist when they are opened, not play them... so when IDM finishes I just have it open the file and boom, it's added to the playlist. Works great, this method.. but I'm wondering... are there any tools out there designed specifically for Podcasts?

I'm not sure.. is there a better, more efficient way to do what I'm doing? I guess that's my big question here . If you follow the links I've provided, (check out the mp3 blogs the Hype Machine links to on the right...), you will undoubtedly lose hours of time ahead of you, but they will be very well spent. I for one had a blast embarking on this phenomenal journey of musical discovery .


Have fun!


EDIT (Correction!):
Oh my!! I gave false credit. I did read that PC World article today and loved it... but not until reading this Lifehacker entry did the journey start: http://www.lifehacke...ic-online-138265.php
THAT's where I got Aurgasm from . Gotta fucking love Lifehacker.

[mouser]

i'm very happy to read your post moerl - i'm a big fan of the idea of discovering rare music rather than having the music companies and mainstream radio tell me what to listen to.

i have to admit i'm completely confused by the term podcasting, and quite confusied myself about the best way to keep track of found music..  any suggestions would be welcome.

this kind of gets back to a question asked by someone on the forum a long time ago - asking for a nice way to keep track of downloads.. i suddenly see the value of having a nice organized way to keep track of what files you downloaded from what pages and why...

[moerl]

You know what I need? A software cataloguing program. Also, maybe one for music... currently I do everything manually and I keep stuff in folders. It's not that great, really. I'd like to be able to look at my software collection, with categories, possibly, independently of folder structure on disc. Same thing for music I suppose.. although with music it's not that bad, because I don't divide by genre, just by artist, so a list of folders with albums makes sense.

I'm happy if you're happy, mouser, lol. No seriously, you're perfectly right. I'm very much for the personal discovery of music. It's a hard thing to do, I find, and it takes time and work... but it's extremely rewarding, and TONS OF FUN. I could do it all day... technically, that's kind of what I DID do all day, haha.

One way to organize things would be with a download manager... but that's a very basic way of organization, and probably not enough. Check out my screenshots for examples with IDM. It does all that automatically. But a catalogue software would be excellent.

[moerl]

mouser, here's one open source Podcast receiver/client that looks very promising judging by the looks of the site design of the associated site, LOL. It's very weird.. because I know I looked at that just 2 or 3 weeks ago and it was called iPodder. They just recently renamed it into JUICE. Cool name, still. I knew about that client already, but as always when I'm looking for a client for a specific function, I check Wikipedia and its "clients" list at the end of the article. So I looked up "podcast" on Wikipedia, and it had what I was looking for... a list of clients. That list is extremely short and very much incomplete right now, but hey, it'll grow in time. In fact, I might add some clients myself

Thunderbird works great, but of course it won't play anything. You will have to manually download the file, which for me works very well with the method outlined in the original post of this thread. But still I'm curious about an ACTUAL Podcasting tool. I'll give Juice a go.

[Carol Haynes]

Moerl,

Actually the database idea is a good one.

Maybe a local SQL DB would be good - you could actually store all your music and downloaded applications and even you documents in it and have instant access.

I have a huge amount of downloaded software (bought and freeware) and could really do with a better way of stroing it that in a huge folder tree.

Not sure I am up to producing it though!

[moerl]

exactly.. I even divide my stuff between a separate partition on my laptop's drive and an external drive... it's a pain having to keep the two in sync. I'd much rather just have a software library type thing... a program made for collecting software... and separately, music. They don't need to be one program as music and software are of very different nature.

[vegas]

OMFG how has no one mentioned GarageBand (www.garageband.com), I mean talk about the bliss of finding good new music!  They have such a great system set up over there.

[moerl]

I never saw/found or read about GarageBand.com anywhere. Thanks for that link! Looks like a great site. I don't have time to check it out now... but will do so ASAP

Thanks

[vegas]

I didn't so much mean anyone here not mentioning it as much as that pcworld article not mentioning it.  Anyways I appreciate the topic as you have led me to some sources to discover new music.  If anyone else has more sources, please do post infos. 

[moerl]

holy crap... look at this: http://www.lifehacke...n-the-web-136578.php

More links than you'll want to see. All those comments... and not one mention of GarageBand... or am I missing it? I could add it to that comments page if it isn't there yet

[moerl]

This is absolutely overkill... in one day I found multiple ways to find great, free music online, I find literally dozens, if not hundreds of MP3 blogs, I dove into the world of podcasting.. though I'm still on the surface of that.. I subscribed to a bunch of MP3 blogs, created a playlist of over 40 songs with nothing but freely available music from MP3 blogs.. and got my brain blown up with all kinds of music discovery sites, review sites...

The internet is too much for me