philwilson.org

I do not listen to many podcasts. This is mainly because I used to have trouble syncing a subscription list across multiple PCs. Now I have a Nokia N95 I use that as my primary client. It works well and I have started adding some feeds.

I don’t listen to music podcasts though - I’ve tried and they are almost always too long and players don’t allow me to add a bookmark a place in the hour-long mp3 where I actually liked a song and want to look it up later, or mark a point where someone mentions a URL or whatever.

Also the default media player won’t store information for submission to Last.fm. I also use Symbian OggPlay, an open source C++ app which I’m tempted to see if I build a binary from and add played items storage (although it might just be easier to write from from scratch in Python if all my podcasts are mp3s).

This means the core of my subscriptions are these:

• Digital Planet (BBC)
• Friday Night Comedy/The Now Show (BBC)
• LugRadio (some blokes)
• Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s film reviews (BBC)
• Pods and Blogs (BBC)
• Russell Howard and Jon Richardson (BBC)
• Voice of S60 (Symbian)

The BBC’s new musc podcasts are all under 15 minutes (AFAIK), which makes them easily searchable and I’ve subscribed to these:

• Music Week (BBC)
• Radio 1 Indie Weekly (BBC)
• Radio 1 Introducing… (BBC)
• Radio 1 Mini Mix (BBC)
• Radio 1 Rock Show (BBC)
• Zane Lowe’s Hottest Records (BBC)

I just about manage to listen to all of these in a week, but I do feel like I’m missing out on some “new music revelation” by not having an adequate player for long music podcasts like those that Alf recommends. Is there anything out there?

LastGraph ‘05 © pip / CC

I’ve just bought my first ever digital-only album. It was “We are the Pipettes” by, erm, The Pipettes.

I actually bought it via last.fm, after listening to their tracks through the embedded last.fm player, who redirect through to 7digital, who, once I’d registered and paid my £7.99, offered to let me download each track in either WMA, AAC or mp3 (Amazon are charging either £4.47 or £11.99 for the physical disk, depending on who you believe).

In order to download the entire album in one go I had to install some software on my local PC (currently Windows-only), but it was a breeze to install and let me download my mp3s in a matter of mere moments. There doesn’t even appear to be any DRM in the files and I’ve been playing them happily on my Ubuntu machine. This is how things are supposed to be.

The album’s great by the way.

Mark’s linked to David Pashley’s ogg player roundup. For what it’s worth, I’ve been looking into this recently too, except I had some additional restrictions which, given the players David puts on show, leaves me with only one choice (which was the one I’d previously selected in my own research): the Samsung YP-U2 (1GB for £61 or 2GB for, er, £58).

My additional restrictions were:

• rechargeable internal battery
• must not need cable to connect to PC

The player I’d be replacing is the Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB which I’d give three stars for general alright-ness.

Whether I can actually justify spending ~£60 on a new player which will only give me a minor playing upgrade (only a few tens of tracks in my 20GB compressed-format music collection are in ogg) and some usability benefits (no more lugging a mini-USB cable and spare batteries around) is yet to be seen.

In fact, looking back, I’ve been wanting this player since June 2006. This is reasonably depressing - does this really mean there have been no new decent ogg-capable players for at least eight months?