monkinetic weblog | redmonk.net

A while back I blogged about Mashuptown, the awesome site and podcast that has been showcasing mashups (two unrelated songs mixed together in some clever way) for the last, oh 8 mos, or so.

Recently Art announced that Mashuptown is closing it’s doors, and taking down all the music it’s been hosting. This is a real shame, and is probably due to some (heh - I first typed “sue” there - Freudian slip?) cease-and-desist letter from the usual suspects.

Art was kind enough to stop by a while back and wish Jodi and I well in our process to adopt Adelina. I wish Art the best of luck, and hope that there are more mashups in his future!

Not sure if this is new in iTunes 6, but on whim I tried dragging a link to Merlin’s new podcast onto the “Podcasts” group in iTunes. Boom - it subscribed to the podcast and started to download the most recent show. Apple rocks.

I’ve uploaded the lastest PodCastHelper. PodCastHelper is now a Mac OS X AppleScript application, so it should be much more efficient. I’ve wrapped up some of the external calls so they won’t throw a dialog up if they error out. Also, PCH now recognizes timecodes that start with ‘#’, so Christiaan Stoudt’s HomeNetworkHelp.info podcasts work “out of the box”.

PodCastHelper 0.2

There may be a newer version soon. Requires Growl 0.6.x.

PodCast Helper is a stay-open AppleScript that looks at the current track in iTunes; if the genre is “podcast”, it grabs the comment from the track, and parses it for timecodes and notes of the form:

@4:35 some note

If it finds any, it will watch the track and when it hits the appropriate timecode, it will use Growl (http://growl.info) to popup a notification with the note. Ideally, Growl would be able to show HTML, or at least text with links in it, so pocasters could include clickable links in the notes. Sans that, this script is really more of a proof of concept.

Usage: expand the archive and put the script somewhere. Double click the script and click “Run” when it opens. That’s it. Of course, the podcast must have notes of the appropriate format for this to work. The format, again, is:

@mm:ss note

Download: PodCast Helper

If you want to port this to Cocoa or some other environment, please do. It’s licensed under a CC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

Mark Vanderwettering has updated his site, Brainwagon.com, to WordPress 1.5. Look nice! Try his podcast sometime if you’re into that.

Thanks to iPodderX’s podcast directory, I discovered Coverville, a show dedicated to playing both indie and RIAA cover tunes. I am all about the cover tunes. w00t!

I had the fortune of participating in a Tech Chat this weekend with Kreg Stepp, David Newberger, and Robert Kloosterhuis. The Tech Chat is a podcast roundtable discussion created, hosted, and usually moderated by Kevin Devin. Thanks to Kevin and the guys for the opportunity to hang out!