Ranting and Roaring

The “My Radio”, “My Bloggers” and “My Podcasters” folders now have an “All Attachments and Podcasts” cabinet that contain all downloaded attachments. This will show up in the next version.

When working offline, the “show in browser” button should copy the URL to a “hold” folder. When you’re back online you can go to that folder to view online. After viewing, the folder should be cleaned up automatically.

• There should be a “record until finished” option, for recording shows with a fixed length.
• It should be possible to break long shows into multiple parts, say in 10, 15, 20, 30 and 60 minute chunks.
• It should be possible to record shows forever (!). The shows should be organized nicely in a hierarchical structure.

I’m going to start blogging ideas for new features in Sparks! and Jäger here in our blog, so you know what we’re up to, so you can provide feedback and so we don’t lose track of what we’re doing.

• The location bar needs to track the currently displayed page, not the page that the user first clicked on
• The location bar needs a subscribe button to allow the user to subscribe to the currently displayed page.

Here’s a screenshot of Sparks! showing a Persian blog (and listing a Japanese blog a little further up).

The first line of code in Jäger was written one year ago today!

Ho ho ho!

I just found out that I’ll be a guest for about 20 minutes on The World Tonight, this evening, on CHQR Calgary talk radio. The interview is scheduled for 7:30 pm Alberta time, after they warm up my audience with…

This question showed up on Metafilter yesterday:

Anyone out there using the Jaeger podcaster?

I was hoping that I could use it to listen to the Teenage Wasteland archives from WFMU. But I’m not sure how to set up a feed, any ideas?

We’re moving our radio recording feature out of Jäger an into our new product Sparks! which has been designed especially for this purpose. Here’s how you do what you want:

• Get, install and run Sparks!
• Go to the Teenage Wasteland page
• Drag any of the archive links (the URL will have “.ram” in the path) to Sparks! A “Subscription Wizard” will popup up.
• Check the “Discover Radio Stations” button (if you dragged directly to the “My Radio Stations” directory, it will be checked for you)
• Press “Next” until you get to the “Set Recording Schedule” page
• Change:
  • “Repeat” to “Record Now”
  • “Home Page URL” to “http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/TW”
  • “Record for” to something appropriate
• Press Next and then Finish
• Wait for the recording to finish

Recordings in Sparks! expire after 7 days so you’ll probably want to copy it somewhere else or right-click on it and select “Saved”.

Reading through this list I realize it’s probably going to be necessary to figure out a way to record non-live shows better. Still, almost every bit of information above is necessary except the recording length.

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs was on Los Angeles’ KRLA Talk Radio 870 last night using BlogMatrix Sparks! (try it!) I taped the show and you can listen to it here.

Notes from user Ryan on getting Sparks! to encode radio as MP4 files.

Don’t worry about the genre thing. It’s very minor. I’ve seen LAME crash before on non-standard genre fields. Besides iPod’s don’t support id3 tag sorting for m4b files, they are lumped into the Audiobooks category…

Anyway, I experimented with the wave to mp3 option and am happy to report a successful test:

I used the following string in the dialog:

 e:/faac.exe -o test.mp4 --artist $mp3_artist \ --title $mp3_title --genre $mp3_genre $FILEIN 

I renamed test.mp4 to test.m4b and it played perfectly.

Sparks! did generate a Download Failure error message (log file attached), but everything is ok with the file.

The Advanced Encoding Settings has a field for setting the extension (and thus we’ll be able to just use $FILEOUT) but it’s not hooked up yet. Next version

FAAC crashed on my first two attempts for the followings reasons:

1. I used $FILEOUT instead of test.mp4; $FILEOUT appends .mp3 to the filename (as you indicated, the ‘extension’ box isn’t presently hooked-up)
2. I tried test.m4b instead of test.mp4; FAAC crashed on this because, like .mp3, .m4b is not a supported extension of FAAC (though I’ve read there are re-compiled versions of FAAC that do support m4b.)

It seems as though FAAC is the real barrier for me here. I don’t know if you really want to support m4b in Sparks! (I don’t know how requested this feature is among podcasters). In which case Sparks! could perform the renaming of mp4 to m4b. Otherwise, I’ll keep digging around for an AAC command-line encoder that supports m4b. Thanks for the additional mp3 tag variables!

As mentioned, you’ll have complete control over the output extension. We’ll also be providing a download site with precompiled versions of tools such as FAAC soon.

Kathy informs me she’s resurrected Recovering Liberal. Yes!

Little Tobacco: a (non-looney) libertarian-themed blog on Canadian politics by Joseph “My last name is McCarthy and I don’t like communists” Olde.

What’s For Dinner: you’re not invited but you’ll want to check out the pictures.

Based on the feedback we received yesterday, we decided to do a quick release this morning with a few changes:

• Tooltips are now over the icons to the left of the location area (above the browser). For the record, the difference between these and those in the toolbar is that these will always open in an external application
• The entry title for recordings is now the “Song Name” from the Advanced Settings for MP3 Tags
• When new blogs are added or radio stations are subscribed to, they are selected in the tree control
• There are many more options for the MP3 tags. (Try My Radio Stations > right-click > Advanced Encoding Defaults > MP3 Tags and entering $blog – $begin_year.$begin_month.$begin_day for $(delta_hour)h $(delta_minute)m $(delta_second)s in the Song Name field). The fields are:
  • begin_year, begin_month, begin_day: recording date
  • begin_hour, begin_minute, begin_second: recording time
  • delta_hour, delta_minute, delta_second: clock time it took to record
  • delta_minutes: total number of minutes spent recording
  • delta_seconds: total number of seconds spent recording

We’ve updated the Advanced Encoding Settings documentation.

1.7.4-beta won’t be available for about 20 minutes while a small installer bug is fixed. It’s back.

BlogMatrix Sparks! 1.7.4-beta for Windows is available here. If you’re running an older version of Sparks! we suggest you upgrade to this version.

The following changes have been implemented:

• The radio recorder will restart and/or retry if it cannot connect or if the network dies during recording. The parameters for this is controlled by the Advanced button next to the Bitrate field in the recording schedule. The documentation for this feature is here (more coming today)
• It is possible now to manually configure the programs used for recording Internet streams or creating the final output files (i.e. it’s possible to write MPEG-4 rather than MP3s). More details will be forthcoming on this feature.
• The MP3 ID3 information written with recordings can be easily changed (using the Advanced button)
• The default values for all Advanced Encoding can be changed by “My Radio Stations > right click > Advanced Encoding Defaults”
• Sparks! is a first class blog reading application.
  • Import your OPML blogroll using “My Bloggers > right-click > Subscribe…”
  • Use the green >| arrow button to go to the next unread blog. All unread entries will be listed.
  • Use the green > arrow button to go to the next unread blog entry.
• There’s a cool new “blogger” icon
• The “Recent Recordings” and “Recent Downloads” cabinet that was under “My Radio Stations” et al. has been moved to a single cabinet called “Recent Podcasts and Recordings” at the top level. This cabinet contains all the attachments downloaded in the last 48 hours
• The browser has a status bar
• There is a built in media player for audio and video files. Video bloggers take note! Use the two buttons next to the location field (in the upper right corner) to play externally

The next release will focus on BitTorrent and improving Podcast reception.

Sparks! doesn’t work on Windows ME. Sorry — this version of windows is just too backwards for the libraries we’re building our code on.

Just so everyone’s clear about what we’re doing here…

The next release, on Monday, will include:

• the advanced encoding settings
• the ability to retry to record a station due to a connection failue (hopefully this will solve a lot of the periodic or flaky recording problems people have been having)
• the ability to change the underlying programs, especially the MP3 encoder. This will allow you to do MPEG-4 encoding, for example.
• control over the MP3 tags

The release after that, probably for Wednesday or Thursday will have BitTorrent and possibly better control over MP3 tags for Podcasts.

The next release of Jäger will give you much greater control over how MP3s are encoded, what tags are added and what happens when recording fails. Read about it here.

Download it here. This is quick bug fix release to fix two intolerable problems:

• The media player always reverts to Windows Media Player every time you restart
• The first time you start Sparks! the directory does not show up

In addition, you will see our toolbar has evolved slightly. This is a work in progress and we’ll have more info later.

Mac Users: your directory will return the second time you run Sparks! Unfortunately, there will be no more Mac releases until the new year.

Get it here. This is functionally identical to the Windows release.

Sparks! 1.7.1-beta for Windows is now available. There’s a number of important changes:

• Sparks! now installs in its own directory, independent of Jäger. We are going to remove radio recording from Jäger and let Sparks! specialize in this. The 1.6 numbering will remain for Jäger versions; 1.7 will be the beta s for Sparks.
• The My Directories and My Subscriptions notebook is now gone. Everything is in the one tree control.
• Sparks! is now a first rate weblog reader. Use the “My Bloggers” to store your weblogs.
• Import your old blogs into Sparks! by using OPML. We’ll have a proper UI function for this soon, but for now just right-click on “My Bloggers”, choose “Subscribe…” and select the OPML file.
• You can move weblogs back and forth between My Bloggers and My Podcasters by drag and drop.
• There is a control bar on the bottom which we will explain in another post. The most important button is the green triangle in the lower-left corner which will bring you to the next unread posting.
• There is a search area available but its just for show! It’s not quite finished yet.
• The web browser has a location area above it showing what you are looking at

• Select Actions > Tools > Export Blogroll or OPML
• Select the Publish as OPML link
• Scroll down to the section “Blogroll”
• Click on Right-click on this link
• From your browser, File > Save

I’m still laughing at this one:

Yet history will show that, for all their organizing skill and moral sensitivities, the boomers took a pass on actually changing one hellish state policy rather than have a few uncomfortable conversations with their kids. Gotta have that moral high ground even at the kitchen table, it seems. Boomers have collaborated and shamelessly switched sides on the war on drugs with full knowledge of the repercussions. If the greatest generation had landed at Omaha Beach, pissed themselves, tossed their weapons into the sea, and begged to serve as Nazi slop-boys, then you might have an equivalent act of mass cowardice.