The Hickensian

30.03.06 Hicksdesign's Found Sounds

14 comments
Tagged with: hicksdesign, ideas, music, podcast, updates

Here’s another of those small steps.

I’ve been wanting to dip my toes in the podcast pool for such a long time now, not to bring my droning about OS X browsers to an audio format, but to share music that I’m into. Podcasts are too much like hard work, but I loved the way that Buzz Anderson has done his – ad-hoc linking to single track mp3’s in de.licio.us. So Found Sounds is in effect, a complete and utter steal of his idea, sorry Buzz.

Whereas Buzz looks like he’s going to be using Odeo in the future, I wanted to use Textpattern for mine, with Feedburner converting the feed, providing the support for enclosures. I just add a rel=”enclosure” attribute to the mp3 link and away we go. Thanks go to Tom Martin for the method.

The criteria of Found Sounds is simple. If a band or record company has provided an mp3 free on their site, and I love it, it goes in. Occasionally, there may be crossover with those provided by 3hive, but I hope to avoid repetition if possible.

So, here’s the first post, here’s the second post, and here’s the feed to grab for it. Feel free to use the comment fields on each post to tell me what you thought.

P.S – I also got around to adding tags to posts, thanks to this wonderful plugin

Comments | RSS

No.1

∞ ACoolie said 1412 days ago:

Sounds good, I can’t wait to hear your taste in music. Hope it’s as good as your design =P

No.2

∞ Buzz Andersen said 1412 days ago:

Cool Jon—I was unaware of that technique! Honestly, I’ve gone to Odeo mainly because I need to keep my podcast “among friends” (having run afoul of “the man” one too many times). Looking forward to what you come up with.

No.3

∞ Andrea said 1412 days ago:

I just found that plugin too! Very excited about it, and about the music, too. :)

No.4

∞ Mark Lawler said 1411 days ago:

Good idea Jon, I have just subscribed to the feed. You are, after all, the man who got me into Sigur Ros :-)

No.5

∞ Richard Rutter said 1411 days ago:

Dude this is such cool idea – the 3hive method of linking to free mp3s provided by bands/labels is a really clever way of side stepping the legal stuff. Can’t wait to get stuck in. I’ll send you the odd suggestion if I come across anything.

The Winamp Music page often offers up some goodies. Getting the mp3 is a bit convoluted. The popup window points to a file on AOL’s servers, which you could use. However the popup also links to the band site which usually hosts the download too, such as Another Sunny Day by Belle and Sebastian.

No.6

∞ Nick Harris said 1411 days ago:

/me watches his iTunes bill rocket

Anyone know of a similar tags plugin for movabletype? I’m running Hirotaka Ogawa’s tagwire… but I want something with the ability to do the /tag directory structure.

anyone?

No.7

∞ Anders G said 1411 days ago:

Nice idea Jon!

By the way, is the capital I written on purpose? Makes a nice acronym – HIcksdesign’s Found Sounds – HIFS.

No.8

∞ Jo-Pete Nelson said 1411 days ago:

Are you still going to post the tunes in your blog as you have done for the first two, or do we have to subscribe to your podcast to be able to see any new songs?

Thanks for reminding me about 3hive. It was probably your site that first linked to it however long ago, but I’d forgotten about it when I changed computers and forgot to save my bookmarks.

No.9

∞ Jon Hicks said 1411 days ago:

@Jo â€“ it will reamain a separate feed for now, as not everyone who reads the journal wants the podcast etc. I am thinking about an Ã¼ber feed that includes journal, sidenotes, flickr, riffs and podcast as one though.

The tunes are posted to a separate section, but I â€˜showâ€™ the last 2 at the top of the journal page, so while theyâ€™re on the same page, the feeds are different.

No.10

∞ Jon Hicks said 1411 days ago:

@anders – No, I’m always doing that to myself, and it annoys the hell out of me!

No.11

∞ Mackie said 1409 days ago:

The problem with podcasting is that 99% of the music worth listening to is not public domain. Does anyone know about a license similar to the radio stations’? Because all the stuff on radio is a bunch of crap nowdays.

No.12

∞ Anders G said 1409 days ago:

If you’re a US resident you can use Pandora .

No.13

∞ Morgan Aldridge said 1409 days ago:

Nice Jon, I like.

I set up Podcasting for the Small Dog Electronics blog in Textpattern by creating a new section that generates the RSS feed with enclosures and all that jazz. I looked at the Feedburner method, but decided against it for the following reasons:

# Learn the RSS format & play with Textpattern more

# Be able to highly customize the feed, if needed

# We already have systems in place to dig through server logs and such to analyze traffic, so I didn’t really need that part of Feedburner’s service.

Thanks for turning me on to Textpattern years ago. I still love it and I think I do well by it.

No.14

∞ Jo-Pete Nelson said 1407 days ago:

I’m old fashioned and don’t currently use an RSS aggregator (I’ll probably start using one whenever I get around to making an RSS feed for my own site), so I definitely appreciate that you put the songs on your site. However, I would like to point out that if you always have the two most recent at the top of your site, it hides new articles from view.

Just something to think about.

-Jo-Pete