Hugo’s blog

I’ve been raving about podcasts to people around me for the past month. It’s time for me to play my broken record to a broader audience.

Podcasts are cool!

I’m listening to radio shows as podcasts and they have really changed my life.

Do you feel that your are out of touch with what’s happening in the world and in your country?

Easily solved by podcasts. You can get the news, and be aware of what’s happening in the world in half an hour, whereever you are.

For French people, I recommend L’essentiel de l’info en 25′ d’Europe 1 and la revue de presse de France Inter.

Do you enjoy listening to people making endless pedantic analysises about the last football (soccer) games?

You can’t live without podcasts! You can hear Eugène Saccomano and friends on RTL whenever you want, or Guy Roux and his buddies on Europe 1.

Do you need extra motivation when you go running?

Podcasts are here for you. Listening to music isn’t always easy as I have a tendency to align my running on the song’s tempo, which isn’t so great. However, you can listen to radio shows on the topics you like, that you would not have the time to listen to otherwise.

Do you spend too much time on a plane?

I do. Spending more than 10 hours on a plane gets tiring quickly, as you’re stuck in this confined environment with not much to do. This is when listening to a stupid talk show helps a lot: you have the feeling that you’re not on a plane anymore, that there’s tons of activity around you, that you’re actually in the real world.

For French people, I started to like listening to Laurent Ruquier’s show. Despite not being a fan of Ruquier, it’s very light and gives you 1h30 of fresh air during which you forget you’re on a plane.

Finally, it has allowed me to discover interesting radio shows, that I am very happy to listen to regardless of where I am (in the street, on the subway, at home), like Frédéric Taddéi’s daily interview or Didier Porte’s chronicle.

I haven’t looked at other types of podcasts yet, though I’m not sure I would have time to actually listen to them. The only downside is that I find myself listening to music less. It will probably even out in the long run.

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!