More Timeshifted Radio

In retrospect, I’m not sure why in my post yesterday I was so anal about “one week of radio fitting on a CD.” After working with this a little, I decided there is no reason to require artificial cutoff points. I have my directories of things to burn to disk, and when they get close to ~700 MB, I’ll burn the disk and start on the next one. It is kind of important to me to have the radio programs be chronological, so each CD will have an M3U playlist keeping them in the right order. If there is room left over when the next show is too large, I’ll fill that in with MP3s of interviews, like the ones from Christopher Lydon. I just found out about Massive Change radio via the many links to the recent Bruce Sterling interview there. As I find MP3 interviews of interest to me, I’ll drop them in the directory and when they fit on the CD I’ll burn them. No urgency here, when they fit they’ll go. I like this plan, and I’d rather download the MP3s and have them ready to go in a formal process rather than either having buildups of links in my aggregator that I want to check out but not yet or random MP3s in a temp folder that I rapidly forget what they are.

In my post yesterday, I missed that KCRW in Santa Monica has a 128 KB feed with a 44 KHz sampling rate. Nice, it sounds great! I added their programs The Treatment and Bookworm to my RadioLover schedule. It’s a shame their archives are in RealAudio and not MP3, or I’d load up on the recent interviews I’d like to hear like Joan Didion and Jonathan Lethem. As it is, I’ll now have to listen to them reatime while sitting at a computer. The hard part of that is remembering to do it. This is an attention economy, and I have far too little for all the things I want to turn it to!

I think every donation supported station that streams their air sound should accept donations via PayPal. I’m thinking about deciding an amount that I want to give to public broadcasting in total, and then pro rating it by an approximation of how much of my listening is happening on what station. A chunk to the local one, a chunk to KRVS in Lafayette, and slices to the stations I am recording for the iRiver CDs. However, the ones who can’t or won’t take relatively small donations easily will get skipped and that money thrown back in the pool. Does this sound equitable and reasonable? It would be nice if RadioLover could print a report breaking it down: Over the last X time period, here are the percentages of your recordings by station.

And let me rail ONE MORE TIME about folks who put these interview MP3s up for download and don’t fill out the ID tags (this means you, Mr. Lydon!) Filling them out makes endeavors like mine far easier, by keeping the metadata with the file. If you don’t do it, I’ll have to. You could do it once, or every single freaking downloader could do it themselves. Which makes more sense to you?