Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m tempted to try TuneUp on my collection of MP3s downloaded as podcasts (and without good ID3 tags) from places like the KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune. The story is that the iTunes plugin automatically identifies your tracks, can fix the tags, and add album art.

I subscribe to a few song of the day podcasts, which makes it easy to get the tracks, but difficult to enjoy them as music in iTunes. But podcast tracks can’t be simply moved over to the music section of your library, it takes a little finagling.

There’s a lot of advice out there suggesting you use one of the menu commands to convert the track to MP3 or AAC, but I prefer not to re-encode my music, and that’s a big hammer for a small problem. To wit: all you really need to do is remove a special ID3 tag that iTunes adds to podcast files to identify them as such. You could use an app like Jaikoz Audio Tagger to strip that tag one-by-one, but you can do it faster all within iTunes.

1. Select the podcast tracks you’d like to move to your music library
2. Right-click (or Control-click) on them and select the Convert ID3 Tags… option from the contextual menu
3. Convert the tag version to v1.0 or v.1.1
4. Copy the tracks to a folder on your desktop or some other temporary location
5. Delete the podcast tracks from iTunes
6. Add the tracks you’d temporarily copied to your desktop back to iTunes (you can probably delete the tracks from your desktop when done with this step)
7. Enjoy those tracks as regular music

The 365 photos meme was quite popular last year (despite the 366 day leap year). I might have joined, but it’s unlikely I would have finished. Instead, I’ve been pushing my my brother-in-law Corey Blanchette, nicknamed CoreyB or CoreyB603, to do 365 songs in 2009. He launched on January first and since then has done songs about elves, the serotonin in Saratoga, Albert Ayler, and a bunch of others.

My favorite so far is An Empty Room Doesn’t Cry But an Empty Person Might, a song that comes from what he describes as a “pretty pretentious” phase of his recording history.

Some of his songs are new; a number of them are previously recorded. You can make a request here, and subscribe to the podcast with this link: http://coreyb603.com/feed/ .

The Chronicle’s Tech Therapy podcast last week featured Libraries vs. IT Departments. (Via.)

I was honored to join the conversation yesterday for the latest Talis Library 2.0 Gang podcast, this one on folksonomies and tags. The MP3 is already posted and, as usual, it makes me wonder if I really sound like that. Still, listen to the other participants, they had some great things to say and made it a smart discussion.

I approached the conversation with the notion that what we were really talking about was whether libraries should give their patrons the opportunity to organize the resources they value in ways that make sense to them. For some time one of our patrons here has been telling us he wants all the books that he’s interested on one shelf, and for years the standard retort has been a chuckle. But, why, he might today ask, can’t our library systems make this possible in some virtual way now?

Tags — specifically user contributed tags — are a big element in this larger question. Though they bring up all manner of concerns from authority to vocabulary control, they’ve shown great value outside libraries and interest in them has been energized with the active discussions about how to re-imagine our library catalogs for today’s needs.

My big question is who “owns” those tags, and what motivates taggers. LibraryThing, has enjoyed some great success with tags, while Amazon has achieved little. Tim Spalding’s theory on the matter echos Josh Porter’s dissection of “The Del.icio.us Lesson,” where he notes that “personal value precedes network value.” That is, people tag for personal, perhaps even selfish reasons. People don’t tag to help the community, they tag because it helps the tagger.

I’ve been tagging my stories at MaisonBisson for some time now, and the effort has paid off by making my content more findable both internally and externally at services like Technorati. Flickr makes tagging even more valuable, as the tags are often the only searchable content for image. How else could I find my library-related photos if not from the tags?

On the other hand, my own experiment in user contributed tags seems to have fallen flat, as I’ve received very few useful tags despite the high number of readers who I’d expect to be familiar with tagging. Meanwhile, del.icio.us tells me that there are 133 tagged bookmarks to MaisonBisson in their database. This leaves me wondering if I should invest more effort in working on user contributed tag system that lives in my blog (or or a library catalog, or other discrete system), or should I instead focus on making those systems support outside tagging systems like del.icio.us? This is easy for my blog, where all the pages are already URL addressable, but bibliographic systems are a bigger challenge.

update: hey, Abby’s talking about this over at Thingology and her headline is way better than mine. Darn. Still, the point remains: we need to leverage our systems to make it easy for our patrons organize the things they like wherever and however they wish. Then, we should look for ways to find value in the aggregate. That’s the del.icio.us lesson.

folksonomies, folksonomy, interview, l2, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalogs, library systems, opacs, podcast, tagging, tags, talis, talking with talis

Gizmodo pointed out these USB and FireWire podcasting kits from Alesis.

The package gets you a (hopefully not sucky) microphone with desktop stand, headphones, a carrying case, podcast production software, Cubase LE recording and editing software, and a digital mixer that plugs directly into the computer via USB or FireWire (duh). The US$400 USB version does two channels of 16bit/44.1 KHz audio while the US$600 FireWire model cranks eight channels of 24bit/48KHz sound.

alesis, audio production, kit, package deal, podcast, podcasting kit, production

Thanks again to a good tip from Ryan, I’ve get something new to laugh at: The Aural Times.

Aural Times, music, news, podcast, singing news, The Aural Times, The Times

Ryan Eby pointed out PodBop, a site that podcasts sample tracks from bands coming to your area (or any other area you select), and we both wished we’d thought of it ourselves.

There’s nothing coming to Warren (of course). But they’ve got coverage for Denver, where I’ll be in May, so it immediately found a place in my podcast aggregator.

Laura Fries might have covered the smart and cool factors best:

Why this is smart, and why an entertainment-oriented newspaper would be smart to copy it

• It’s easy. It’s convenient. It’s cool.
   
• Podbop skirts the legality of files issues by only linking to mp3s already published online.
   
• This project is dynamic; relying on user-contributed content. Instead of manually uploading mp3 files (and tracking down pesky legal releases), this site is a mash up of events feeds and music files that users enter into the database. As the database of songs grow, the site will become infinitely more useful. As it becomes infinitely more useful, the more likely it is to have lots of participation from the public.

Why this is cool

• Sweet. Free music=awesome.
   
• Free music + upcoming shows = stuff to do; awesome!
   
• Democratic, baby! Local bands can gain new audiences in a snap.

Calendars for too long have been the domain of “groupware,” the near antithesis of social software. Upcoming launched the first assault on that in late 2003, PodBop advances that a generation.

podbop, eventful, upcoming, event, calendar, social software, podcast, local, music, concert calendar, shows, show calendar

Thanks go to Jenny for the link to the They Might Be Giants podcast!

And all that brings up something I was too lazy to figure out before. Interestingly, it became an issue now only because I was also too lazy to look for the TMBG podcast in the iTunes podcast directory. It turned out to be easy enough to subscribe directly, but here are the directions from Apple:

If you can’t find a podcast on the iTunes Music Store, never fear. You can subscribe to virtually any podcast in the known universe by dragging its URL into your podcast playlist, or by typing the URL into “Subscribe to Podcast” under the Advanced menu.

So there you go. No more excuses.

podcast, tmbg, they might be giants, music

Ken forwarded me this podcast of Robert Cialdini speaking on his Six Weapons of Influence, which he lists as

• Reciprocation
• Commitment and consistency
• Social proof
• Authority
• Liking
• Scarcity

Cialdini’s book is in its fourth edition, and has apparently been adopted as a text for more than a few classes and the concepts have worked their way into everybody’s marketing seminars. Motivation speaker and marketing yakyak Patricia Fripp summarizes those six weapons like this:

• The Old Give and Take–and Take
• Hobgoblins of the Mind
• Truths Are Us
• The Friendly Thief
• Directed Deference
• The Rule of the Few

Academics often feel uncomfortable mixing marketing in their fields, but isn’t it worth a look?

tags: apparently, authority, commitment and consistency, directed difference, friendly thief, give and take, hobgoblins of the mind, liking, marketing, motivation speaker, patricia fripp, podcast, reciprocation, robert cialdini, rule of the few, scarcity, six weapons of influence, social proof, thief, truths are us, uncomfortable, yakyak