OTR-cast?
Although I’m still not anywhere near caught up (gee, that’s a surprise, isn’t it?), and am right now falling even farther behind because of the relapse of an old back injury (man, getting old is tough), I need to ask you, gentle reader, if you have any interest in this blog hosting OTR-casts. (Hey, if Winer/Curry can make up a goofy name for something that’s almost as old as the Internet to make it sound new, so can I, right?)
I’m not talking about any pretentious pontificating, a la Radio-Mumble-Mumble, understand. I’m talking about occasionally posting an OTR show, with any comments I might have to make made within the post itself - c’mon, admit it, you don’t want to hear my nasal voice cutting into the show anyway. The software used here (WordPress) is supposed to handle these things transparently, so there shouldn’t be a whole lot of effort involved on either of our parts; add the blog’s RSS feed to your favorite podcast client and you should receive the MP3 file.
I have to admit this will be a low-priority item (not like the old days of The Nostalgia Pages’s “Show of the Moment” page which used to update twice a week or more), posted on an irregular basis whenever I get some time and the mood strikes.
Post your thoughts in the comments below, or contact me privately through the contact link in the sidebar. If there’s reasonable interest, we’ll see what we can accomplish. If not, well, that’ll be one less thing I have to do.
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February 16th, 2006 at 7:56 am
As one who has been podcasting (yes, I use that word) old time radio for nearly a year here is my take. There are several “casts” out there that do nothing but dump old time radio shows without any kind of “show” wrapper around it. That’s fine, but some of them throw out poor quality shows: badly compressed with hiccoughs, etc. The advantage of the RSS feed is that you don’t have to subscribe to it if you don’t want. But I am not sure what they accomplish.
In keeping with what I have tried to do with my own web site - Radio Days (http://www.otr.com) I prefer to offer something with an educational wrapper around it. My web site has tried to focus for the most part on offering clips or complete shows with some kind of writeup around either the show, the series, or the genre. My podcast does the same. I have two: Radio Detective Story Hour and Adventures in Radio. In both I offer that “show wrapper” I mentioned above along with some personal commentary, which if you want, you can fast forward ahead. I also try to use reasonable quality mp3s including compressing my own from my own library.
On my web site, I do offer some in a similar fashion to what you are talking about, I believe, such as Terry and the Pirates strictly as a feed with no wrapper around it.
I say, yeah, I’d like to see it but please try to keep the quality of the episode up (as I know you will). There are already enough junk mp3s of old time radio floating in cyberspace.
Yeah, I agree; and I have enjoyed your podcasts for a while. I was referring to most of the others in the Radio-Mumble-Mumble, which frankly have boring and uninteresting comments preceeding the show. Besides, I’d rather make any comments I’d like to make here, so those who listen to the show can comment directly…more of a conversation than a dictation.
As to the junk MP3s, I’ve ranted in this space and everywhere else about the same issue. Even 32kbps files can sound good, assuming one takes the time to use good source, properly sampled and encoded. These kids who use an underpowered computer to encode in real-time while downloading pr0n… –cfs3
February 18th, 2006 at 8:47 am
I, of course, an very ‘up’ for the conversation. But I am loathe to add more items to your load!
—Russ
March 4th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
[…] A week ago or so, I asked whether there would be any interest in an OTR-Cast hosted here. I’ve decided against it, for a number of reasons. […]