Hugo’s blog

I’ve been subscribing to more and more podcasts, as I like it to listen to radio shows when it’s convenient for me: in the subway, when I run, in a plane, etc.

However, I discovered in the past week a weird problem: the duration of some podcasts is very short. I have some that last 7 seconds, others that last 20 seconds. And this despite the MP3 being its normal size. 20 seconds for a 50MB MP3, that’s suspicious!

An example of this is La Revue de Presse de France Inter. The MP3 file 7.3MB, iTunes says it lasts 7 seconds, so does my iPod, and only plays those 7 seconds. This same MP3 played by RealPlayer, MPlayer, VLC, QuickTime, lasts 7:54. I have a similar issue with the RTL Podcasts.

Having a closer look at the faulty MP3s, they seem to have an introduction music, and then the show. And the length advertized by iTunes and the iPod is the length of this introduction. I’m wondering if the MP3 specification has an end-of-file marker, and whether those podcasts are just the concatenation of the introduction MP3 and the show recording. As I could not find the specification despite following links from the Wikipedia MP3 page, I am making a lot of guesses here.

However, I tried a few more players (Creative Muvo V200, mpg321, etc.): none of them complains about the format of this MP3, for example, and they all, except iTunes and the iPod, play it in its entirety. MP3 Checker calls the MP3 good, and doesn’t report any error, though I don’t know how reliable this tool is.

I’m wondering if this isn’t a result of the update to iTunes 6.0.2 and of the iPod firmware 3.1.1 I did a few days ago.

Assuming that this isn’t a problem I’m the only one to see (though a number of searches on the Web didn’t confirm this), somebody who can actually do something to fix this will notice the problem. Or so I hope.

Update (2006-01-17): RTL‘s Webmaster wrote to me and told me that it was indeed due to the new version of iTunes, and that the new editions of RTL’s podcasts would not have this problem anymore. Cool!

The cool thing with a Mac is that everything is easy to do. Except when you don’t want to do it the way the OS wants you to.

This is the case with my iPod. I ripped my CDs on my Linux desktop, and I copy my music on my iPod from it using gtkpod. Now, I’d occasionnally like to copy audio files on my iPod while I’m on the road, e.g. podcasts.

The problem is that iTunes wants to associate my iPod to it, which roughly means take complete control of it. And step 1 is to erase its content and start from scratch. I’d really like to be able to have the equivalent of gtkpod on the Mac.

I thought gnupod would do the trick for me. However, when I installed the podcast, it claimed it was there, but I still haven’t figured out where on my iPod!

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~/src/gnupod-0.98.3% gnupod_search.pl -a Europe
gnupod_search.pl Version 0.98.3 (C) Adrian Ulrich
ID  |ARTIST                          |ALBUM                           |TITLE                           
========================================================================================================
1   |Europe1.fr                      |Europe 1 - Actualité et divertissement|Actualité et divertissement 13/12/2005 18H45

iPodDisk doesn’t see it more than I do, and a gnupod check seems pretty confident that everything is OK:

hugo@Oompa-Loompa ~/src/gnupod-0.98.3% gnupod_check.pl  
gnupod_check.pl Version 0.98.3 (C) Adrian Ulrich
Pass 1: Checking Files in the GNUtunesDB.xml...
Pass 2: Checking Files on the iPod...
..finished

  Total Playtime : 254 h
  Space used     : 18.41 GB
  iPod files     : 3449
  GNUpod files   : 3449
 -> Everything is fine  

Mr Podcast, where are you?

Update: It turns out that after all my investigation, I discovered that iTunes is happily showing all my songs and I can copy a PodCast happily. So what was that earlier message about associating my iPod with it then? I’m very confused. Or did gnupod or iPodDisk did something magical? Well, it seems to be working the way I wanted to, somehow.

Update 2:Yamipod seems like a good alternative to iTunes, and happily sees the content of my iPod. On top of it, it has a cool function to remove duplicated tracks (for some reason, I always end up with a fow duplicates, and I don’t quite know how.

Things are getting real exciting in the world of MP3 (and now video) players. Creative has released a player with capabilities really close to the latest iPod: the Creative Zen Vision:M. And CNET gave it an excellent review.

But it doesn’t only have capabilities similar to the iPod, it also looks a lot like the iPod. And so comments about copying have generated some interesting and provocative statements from Creative.

Things are really started to get fun, and I’m really hoping that the consumer will benefit from all this.

The Vision:M sure looks cool!

This guy built an bike charger for his iPod. It looks hella cool to me, but I bet that the Apple purists will think it’s not stylish enough.