I’ve got roughly 30 podcasts that I subscribe to. Most are fairly short, coming in at under 10 minutes in length (C|NET, Slate, Onion Radio, various NPR shorts). While it’s pretty easy to pick out and play a single podcast on the iPod, it becomes cumbersome when you’ve got a dozen episodes to listen to because you have to let a single podcast run thru to the end, have it go back to the main menu, and then navigate manually to the next program to want to listen to.

You can make a Smart Playlist that puts all of your unplayed episodes into one playlist and they will all run in one long really good radio program. Go to File -> New Smart Playlist
You should get a window similar to the photo accompanying this post (click on the photo for a larger version). Choosing the genre and play count are key – putting a restriction on the time is my personal choice. Set genre to ‘Podcast’, and play count to ’0′. I chose to make this playlist a collection of all the short stuff because I want to make sure that I have the time to listen to a longer podcast. 20 minutes works well for what I’ve subscribed to.

Now, while this so far has been a mind-blowing ‘Oh God why didn’t I think of that’, this next revelation will just make you weep with just how amazing the iPod really is. Make sure that ‘Live Updating’ option is checked. If you’ve got a newer iPod (Nano, and I would assume Video iPods) this playlist updates itself live, on the iPod, away from iTunes. So, you can start with a jam-packed playlist and as you listen to each episode they drop out of the playlist one by one. The smart playlist works for the older iPods, but does not update itself away from iTunes. Despite not auto-updating on the older iPods this tip is most-usefull for you long-time iPod users. Your iPods don’t show what podcast episodes you’ve listened to already. Newer iPods place a dot before new episodes, just like in iTunes. For the 3G and earlier iPods this smart playlist takes the guessing out of ‘have I listened to this yet’? Let me know if this works differently on any of the various iPod models that I’ve not been able to test it on.

Ah little Stacy Q
When she doesn’t have a thing to do
She comes to my house
Well, let’s keep that between me and you
She takes off her clothes
She likes to tell this boy what to do
Let’s keep that between me and you, ok
She said oh come on boy aren’t you tired of talking about sex
I said little girl what do you really expect
And then she pledges her allegiance
To the united states of me
She says you’re such a little bitch

Listen thru iTunes or Webjay

(They’ve got pretty decent cover art, too)

Last.fm runs things a little different. You can get a custom-generated radio station based on a certain artist of your choosing. Now, who remembers musicplasma.com? You could type in ‘Eric Clapton’ and MusicPlasma returns all the artists that are like Clapton (Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Allman Bros, Neil Young, etc). Last.fm creates a radio station based around all those artists. The ‘Eric Clapton’ station includes the Eagles, Jimi Hendrix Cream, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, CCR, The Beatles, etc etc.

There’s iTunes and Winamp plugins, as well as an RSS feed of what has been playing that you can include in your website or whatever.

Did I mention that it’s free?

Read on for more…

The Last.fm is run by the Audioscrobbler crew. They’ve gone thru a great deal of effort to build a music community out of what kind of music you listen to. They give you ‘friends’ and ‘neighbors’ – people with simliar tastes as yourself that you can send messages to. There’s also a public profile page where you can see what someone’s been listening to – and here is where it get a little funky.

They ask you to download a plugin-like thingie that follows what you play in iTunes (or Winamp or Windows Media Player, whatever) and uploads the names of the songs you play on your PC to their servers. They use this data to help better match artists together. If you look way down at the bottom of this page you can see that I listened to the digg.com podcast. I do believe that this list is editable, so you don’t need to announce to the world that you get down to some Britney every once a while (or you can just turn off the plugin, no biggie in my opinion).

There is a wiki that has a dozen different ways to get your RSS feed into a html format. They don’t really promote that there is an RSS feed though – there’s no direct link to it that I can find. I only found the path to mine because some guy had included the path to his RSS in his PHP script.
My Recently Played Music and My Musical Profile. The musical profile seems to be composed of a random selection of songs that I listen to.

Before anyone give me crap for being an overzealous Matchbox20 fan, I just signed up with last.fm only a day or two ago and had one playlist in iTunes going the whole time I was at work that happened to have three of their cd’s.

Last.fm is free but has an optional paid service that gets you some extra doo-dads. I think that they must make most of their cash off of google ads and links thru to amazon.

Invented by dairy farmers for use in fog, the humble cowbell has evolved into a vital component of rock’s percussive arsenal: hit with enough style and vigor, it can make the difference between a track that rocks, and a track that totally rocks. Try to imagine Chicago’s “Beginnings” without the cowbell. It can’t be done. No Way.

Some cuts get a boost from the cowbell, others are simply naked without its insistent hollow thowk. Here, we’ve stashed some of the greatest cowbell-dependent tunes in history, from “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel to the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermint” and the Donnas’ “You Wanna Get Me High.”

The songs are a bit all over the place. Includes (of course) ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ by the Blue Oyster Cult, Santana’s ‘Evil Ways’, Bob Dylan, Kiss and Tom Petty. The compilation continues with natural inclusions like Sir Mix-a-Lot and Britney Spears.

iTunes Music Store: More Cowbell!

We here at Hell Yeah Bitch! like things with good names.

Their list is pretty long, I was going to post it hear, but I got too lazy. But it looks like a good, soild list…with none of their own songs!

Personal Note to the guys in Phantom Planet:
I’m sorry I can’t make it to your concert this weekend, I have to go back up to my old University and go to my girlfriend’s formal and some frat stuff. Please, go ahead and have the concert without me. I know it will be tough, without one of your biggest fans there, but I know you guys can do it.

Be strong,
Mike.

Source: In House

I guess record companies don’t mind if you are a DJ mixing tunes but the minute you make a buck off of it they flip out and sue your ass. But that just leaves us with the only real question…

Source: Wired News: Copyright Enters a Grey Area