cygweb

Via ipodder-dev mailing list: This is a letter that Adam Curry recently received:

Just wanted to touch base with another way that iPodder can (and is) being used. I can selectively subscribe to podcast feeds here at Whole Wheat Radio (www.wholewheatradio.org) and let iPodder pick up them up on a timed schedule. I've adapted my software that runs the station to look in the Downloads directory of iPodder and when it sees a new MP3, it can queue it up and play it immediately on the webcast. It's pretty neat to have short clips play between songs. (I filter out any audio that is longer than 10 minutes...)

So not only can an iPod pick up and play audio, but webcasts can do the same thing. Cool!

Jim Kloss
Talkeetna, Alaska

Great idea. When I blogged about the possibilities of streaming podcasts, I was thinking of it a bit more statically than Jim. Perhaps a daily schedule update. One of the things that's great about a dynamic playlist is that you can get content online at its freshest.

I'm considering investing time into creating a stream that would encompass the following:

• Subscribe to a list of podcast feeds (published on the stream's website) that would be polled on a relatively agressive schedule. New content would be downloaded immediately.
• Parse as much metadata about each podcast as possible for display on the stream website. This would include the tags on the audio file, as well as information in the associated RSS entry.
• Run a scheduling algorithm that favors new content and schedules it to be streamed ASAP. As content ages, it is queued up less often.
• The stream website would inform readers of queued content, estimated play times, and would display metadata and hyperlinks associated with each podcast.

My hobby programming projects are born out of a desire to scratch a personal itch, but if you guys have any feedback, please share it. I think creating this would be a fun exercise.