Letter from the Editor

Dear Listeners and Subscribers,

The Consistency Nazi (TCN) has kindly sent me a screen shot (see above graphic) of what he wants his iTunes playlist to look like when he downloads the show. My apologies.
Unfortunately, due to restrictions on how RSS works (or at least my understanding of how it works!) I cannot change the names of shows, particularly once "the dispersal" has begun. Most listeners do not want to receive my HUGE podcasts (see next point) again, at a lower quality, but with consistent ID3 tags.

Editor's note: Holy crap! I realized in hindsight, as I was working away, that I was assuming most applications reading enclosures will check against the MP3 names listed. If they also check against the ID3 tags themselves to decide wether or not do download them then I am in for a lot of flames. However (TCN) will be happy!

It makes me wish that I had a huge MEGA sponsor like Apple who wanted to support the little podcasters out here and immerse us in Apple technology so that these things really mattered, which of course they do, but I didn't think about them at the beginning. The learning curve of life as a podcaster can be steep.

So that (TCN) can sleep at night I have remade all the ID3 tags in the current back catalogue so that any new subscribers getting the old shows will have a spiffy playlist in iTunes. All new shows will carry the new ID3 tag format that I have used for about the last 4 shows.

Which brings up show sizes, sample rates and RSS feeds. All shows are now being sampled at 128 KPS. All shows in the back catalogue have been resampled to 128 KPS. This makes the shows about one third the original file size. I first tried 96 KPS but there was an ugly swooshing sound to the podcast. 128 KPS seems to be acceptable and not too big.

This should speed up downloads and also let new subscribers getting the olds shows not slow things down as much, which brings up RSS feeds.

I am looking at soon making two categories of RSS feeds a "PREMIERE EDITION" category and a "BACK EDITIONS" feed. I just have not figured out how to do it yet so that I don't waste subscribers bandwidth with a second download. I am open to suggestions and working on it. I am also looking for a solution to giving "priority" to downloads of the PREMIERE edition.

Thanks.
Rob McLeod,The Editor
bovinefreepress.com
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