Ranting and Roaring

Here’s Kathy on KMSR (story details) last night without the common spotty Ottawa loon hooting in the background. You can record streaming radio shows like this yourself using Sparks!.

I recorded alpha blogger Jeff Jarvis this morning on Air America. You can make recordings like this too of any streaming Internet radio program using (the free and open source) BlogMatrix Sparks!, for Windows and Macintosh OS 10.3.

You can here the recording here; he starts about 8 minutes and 45 seconds into the program (and the last 1 minute is missing, unfortunately). Don’t forget to mention Sparks! if you link to this.

Here’s a screenshot (click for a larger version) from the next version of Sparks! running on the Macintosh.

This is pretty much the same as the Windows version except that we’re using a much simpler browser. But look! It’s actually rendering the webpage as text. Very very cool.

If you’re working off the CVS source tree, we suggest that you put that aside and check everything back out. We’ve renamed tons of stuff and deleted many unneeded files. The Sparks! part of the project is much simpler now.

Here’s a screenshot (click for a larger version) from the next version of Sparks!

Here’s what changed:

• The “My Subscriptions” and “My Directories” tabs are gone — everything’s all in the same tree control now
• There’s a search field above the tree control
• There’s a (read-only) location field above the browser
• The little arrow to the right of the location field will open the current page in the browser
• We’ve got some good looking buttons. We actually dynamically composite (using alpha levels) bitmaps and buttons at runtime to get the right look
• (OPML) directories are loaded when the user double-clicks on them. Not only does this save bandwidth, it makes us more comfortable listing all the possible radio directories on the main screen. The directory icon (a little planet) is greyed out until it is loaded.

I didn’t answer any e-mails yesterday. I had a Christmas party yesterday at lunch time and it didn’t wrap up until around 8PM. At 1AM this morning I had a flash of insight how to integrate (the desperately needed) searching into application and simplify the UI even more. I hope you’ll all be pleased with the results: screenshots tomorrow.

BlogMatrix Sparks! 1.6.25-beta available for Mac OS 10.3 is available here.

This release includes everything in the Windows 1.6.24-beta releases plus a few more minor bug fixes.

• “audio/mpeg”, “audio/x-mpegurl” and “.pls” streams are now recognized.
• The tree is correctly resorted after renaming categories or blogs/radio stations
• Under the Radio Stations folder there is a “Recent Recordings” folder; under “Podcasters” there is a “Recent Downloads” folder. These folders contain all successful downloads in the last 48 hours, the most recent at the top of the list
• Video attachments get their own movie clip icon. Jäger and Sparks! have always been able to deal with video attachments, contrary to what this article implies.
• “Update Read” and “Move all to Read” to keep things nice and tidy
• If a radio station cannot be found, a meaningful error message is displayed

Known bugs:

• The “iTunes” icon is pretty well useless. We’ll fix this up for the next release.
• When submitting bugs via “Help > Report a Bug” it’s almost impossible to get log file attached (due to weirdness in Safari)

Currently, when Sparks! is maximized it records that size as the size of the application. If you shut down Sparks! in that state, it will be restarted sized too big for the screen.

The next version will fix that.

Streaming Internet Radio can come down in a lot of different formats. If you try to subscribe to a radio station and it doesn’t work, it’s probably because we don’t recognize that format — yet. Please send us an e-mail if you have a problem and we’ll try to fix you up.

Since the last release, we’ve added:

• audio/x-mpegurl: as seen here http://www.95bfm.com/bfm112.m3u
• a “.ram” URL that points to a “.pls” (audio/x-scpls) that points to a “audio/mpeg” file. You can see one of these here: http://rope.wlsam.com/realplayer/wlsam.ram

Let me save you the trouble of reading this tripe in NOW magazine († Let it Bleed) by summing it up for you:

As the crème de la crème of the Canadian left, we’d rather see a million Iraqis exterminated and the rest enslaved by their brother Arabs than have democracy succeed in Iraq and thus have the Americans get their hegemony on. Hegemony! Hegemony! Doesn’t it make your blood chill? Hegemony … for OIL! And let’s face it: those Iraqis they love nothing better than to dress their women in bags, saw off the heads of people they don’t agree with and periodically have their government rise up and exterminate various subtribes, clans and cliques. It’s their natural condition! They love that stuff! Sure, the resistance is foreign fighters from all over Northern Africa, the Middle East and Europe but quite frankly, all they all look the same to us. And who are we to judge what they’re doing? Who’s to say whether having a mob led by some 7th century theocrat smash the head in of some homosexual with bricks is wrong? Not us, unless we can blame Bush for it. We’ve got better things to worry about, such as the nomenclature that will applied to the tax status of same-sex couples in Canada or issuing press releases from our “institutes”. But mainly, to sum up, the United States disgusts us^* and my feelings are far more important than the freedom or democracy of some r-gh–d I’ll never meet at a SOB cocktail party.

^* because we couldn’t get a second reading anywhere in LA and have ended up shilling for jobs on CBC week after week, having to toss our pearls of wisdom before you ignorant swine

If you try to add a radio station and it says “Ready to add weblogs” but there’s nothing listed:

• That it says “weblogs” rather than “radio stations” is a bug
• When nothing is listed, it should give an error message explaining why
• That nothing is listed may or may not be a bug. Please tell us ASAP and we’ll see what the problem is.

We’ll sort the first two items out for the next version.

Get it here (packaged with Jäger).

There’s lots of cool updates in this version; the last few blog entries have most of the gory details. Not mentioned is that you can encode MP3s at 160 and 192kps now.

The menu option Help > Report a Bug… brings you to a form on BlogMatrix’s site. This form now has the option of uploading the application’s logfile.

• The next version of Sparks! and Jäger beta (coming this afternoon) will fill in the name of the logfile in the field below the “Logfile” form entry. You must manually copy the name up one line for the logfile to be uploaded.
• If you’re running an older version of Jäger, use the Browse… option and select the file C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\BlogMatrix\stderr.log.

If there’s any sort of complexity to your error, we’ll probably need your logfile. There’s no confidential or security related information placed in this file, so don’t be afraid to send it.

There’s a discussion on Gear Live between the editors about The Future of Digital Music“. A choice selection:

Hector: With the players of the future, we will be able to schedule personal recordings of incoming broadcast music on a given hour, and play it back when we have the free time. It’s a very similar concept to what’s being done with DVR’s, such as TiVo. Imagine listening to a certain program or DJ that played a couple nights ago, but at your own leisure. Even better, we would be able to save the recordings into a file for endless playback later. Right now you can record off of an incoming FM signal, but you have to be listening in at the time, and even then you’re not sure if they’re going to play the song that you want. I want to substantially fill out my music collection.

Greg: I definitely think Hector is correct here; TIVO for radio has already begun to emerge a little bit. A program was released about a year ago that recorded at your specified time, any Tunecast radio stream, some even stream at 128kbps and higher, CD quality. The program then cut the stream into separate mp3s and used the information from the radio server to fill in the ID3 tags. But with internet radio and podcasting continually gaining momentum as people sicken of the monotony of the same playlists on every broadcast radio station, the ability of every person interested to start their own radio station is intriguing.

Hey guys, with recording live digital music the future is now: send us an e-mail if you get the chance.

If you want to run the non-beta version (1.6.10) of Jäger with the (beta) version of Sparks!, you’ll have to install one of them in a different directory (on the C:\ drive).

The next version of Sparks! (today, for Windows) will have the following two menu items at the Podcasters/Radio Stations folder, the category folders and at the radio station/blog level:

• Update Read: this will move every entry that you have viewed (or played) to the appropriate “Read” cabinet (i.e. under the blog).
• Move All to Read: this will move entry entry, even if you haven’t viewed or read them, to the appropriate “Read” cabinet.

Thus, if you’ve seen or heard everything you wanted to, right-click on Podcasters (or Radio Stations) and select “Move All to Read” and everything will be cleaned up.

Recording radio stations in Sparks! and Jäger doesn’t appear to work when Jäger isn’t installed on the C:\ drive. Very sad. We’ll try to fix this for next week.

A few changes will be coming in the next version of Sparks!

• MPlayer will run on all platforms so those of you having the STATUS_ILLEGAL_INSTRUCTION problem will be fixed up.
• “audio/mpeg”, ICE and SCPLS type streams are now succesfully recognized
• The tree is correctly resorted after renaming categories or blogs/radio stations
• Under the Radio Stations folder there is a “Recent Recordings” folder; under “Podcasters” there is a “Recent Downloads” folder. These folders contain all successful downloads in the last 48 hours, the most recent at the top of the list
• The “iTunes” and “Windows Media Player” folders are getting a little more useful. There’s still work to be done here: they reflect what Sparks! thinks is in these folders but not what the players actually say are in the playlists
• Video attachments get their own movie clip icon. Jäger and Sparks! have always been able to deal with video attachments, contrary to what this article implies.

We’ve updated our BBC feeds (in “My Directories”) with Radio Cymru, Radio Wales, BBC World Service, Radio Scotland and Radio Ulster plus all their various subfeeds and programs.

Note that you have to (right now) restart Sparks! to see these new feeds.

Elyse Ashburn of the News & Record wrote an article “New technology poised to redefine radio’s existence“. A curious section:

Coming soon

TiVo for radio: Digital technology will enable radio listeners to record and replay music sets much the way digital cable subscribers can do with television programs. You’ll never have to miss Rush Limbaugh or NPR’s “Car Talk” again.

ETA: 2006 or 2007

Well, I guess we’re ahead of the curve by two years. Check out Sparks!.

Rick Pali of the weblog Seeking the Alien Shore wrote great review of my weblog aggregator Jäger yesterday.

The genius behind Jäger is it can be used on any site. Many journals and blogs I read have no feeds, but Jäger informs me of updates just the same. You can keep tabs on virtually any site on the web.

We’ll be doing an update tomorrow with our latest fixes and updates. In the meantime, here’s a few hints.

If your attempt to record radio fails:

• in the “My Subscriptions” panel
• click on the radio station you were attempting to download
• there should be a “Download Failed” icon at the top
• click on that
• send us the detailed error log.

When you’re sending us bug reports, make sure you tell us:

• What kind of computer you’re running
• What OS version you’re running
• Whether you’re using Sparks! or Jäger

If you’re running an Athlon PC or an older computer and the message STATUS_ILLEGAL_INSTRUCTION appears, download this, unzip it, and put the files in “C:/Program Files/BlogMatrix”. This won’t be necessary after the next version as the version of mplayer we will ship will work on all platforms.

Rick of Seeking the Alien Shore wrote great review of my weblog aggregator Jäger yesterday.

The genius behind Jäger is it can be used on any site. Many journals and blogs I read have no feeds, but Jäger informs me of updates just the same. You can keep tabs on virtually any site on the web.

Here‘s an MP3 recording of Kathy‘s appearance on the David Gold show on KMSR this afternoon.

You can make your own recordings of pretty well any radio show on the Internet like this using BlogMatrix Sparks!.

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers. Do check out Sparks! — it’s very cool.

Driving home the other night Trinity-Anne asked to sleep in our bed. “What’s wrong with your bed?” we asked. “Monsters”. My wife said that the only monster in her room was James P. Sullivan who would keep her safe if there were any more monsters, which their aren’t anyway. “But not from Red Eye. He looks up from under the walls”.

I’ve been afraid to go in her room since. That’s straight out of Stephen King.

In other (funnier) Trinity-Anne news:

• When we were driving around in Palm Desert we were singing old McDonald where I would supply the animal and she would provide the sound (i.e. “pig”/”oink”, “cow”/”moo” for you folks who didn’t have childhood). When I said “wife” Trinity-Anne immediately chimes into “with a talk-talk here and a talk-talk there”.
• We went to see The Incredibles. Great movie but bringing a 3 year old was a big mistake. We were slighly late so we didn’t want to get popcorn. Big mistake. Trinity agitated for popcorn the entire movie, culminating in this hilarious incident where she stood up in her seat and said in her loudest (non-scream) voice to Joanne: “I’m going to count three. One … Two … Three … FOUR! GET ME SOME POPCORN”.

  I’m still laughing over that one