Pete Ashton's Weblog

Bonfire Radio podcaster number eight is here. I present to you Sroka Sounds (RSS feed) from Kathy Carless who met my everso stringent quality threshold (basically not being as shit as I was when I started). Woo!

Now, who's to be number nine...?

The seventh, yes seventh show to join the Bonfire Radio podcast station is Monocat (RSS feed) smurshed together by the gentleman known variously as Pau|Zum|Mooncat.

It's another music show. Why the predominance of music based podcasts?, I ask myself repeatedly. Is it just because of John Peel that every Brit feels this is the only true and honest way to do radio, while the 'mericans look to talk radio and NPR for their inspiration?

Anyway, go check out Paul's first effort. Me like. Who wants to be number eight?

Another week, another addition to the Bonfire Radio family. Please give welcome to Cold Citrus, another music-based show coming out of Margate by Mr Shaun Bark. This one is of note because it was completely unsolicited - I don't know Shaun from Adam, or at least I didn't until now - so we're no long a close-personal-chums-of-Pete club, and that's a good thing. Also of interest is that, as with Garen's show, I'm not hosting the mp3s. Part of why I invited others on board was because while hosting files isn't too hard, setting up a decent podcast-friendly RSS feed can be and that shouldn't really be a barrier to entry. Of course it's much easier now (have a look at Feedburner's SmartCast service) but still, it's nice to help. Shaun's podcast is hosted in it's entirety on his own site - I just lift the content and turn it into a feed, and voila, those subscribed to the combined feed get another show.

The odd thing is, everyone's doing music-based shows. Over in the States the majority are talk-based (unless the music ones are hiding under the RIAA's radar, which is plausible) and while I know talk radio isn't so big here, is the spirit of Peel really that strong? Rhetorical question I guess...

There's always a oddly significant difference between what Apple says a new application of theirs will do and what it actually can do. This has been going on for a while, ever since they started embracing the "media delivery" market. iTunes is pushed as a way to buy music and import it into your iPod, when in fact you can use it for all sorts of copyright infringement. iMovie and Garageband are pushed as tools to create your own films and songs, when in fact you can use them to create mix-tapes or mash up pre-existing works with ease. It's an interesting policy, saying one thing publicly to reassure the media companies that they're not "evil" while quietly slipping the users the tools they need to do whatever they want to do. I wonder if it will ever come unstuck...

Anyway, when Apple announced that iTunes was supporting podcasting I didn't have time to upgrade and try it out. A few people emailed asking whether this meant they could download the Bonfire Radio podcasts from within iTunes itself. Having read some of the press I said I seriously doubted it. The big push was that Apple would be reviewing each podcast for quality and legality before adding it to their directory and that podcasts would be available, for free (though with the potential for payment) in the Music Store. Since the Bonfire shows kinda skirt the legality issue a fair bit (and are not exactly pro-quality) it was pretty doubtful they'd be accepted, nor would I really want that kind of publicity anyway.

Today I ran the update and it turns out that yes, there is a directory that is pretty mainstream oriented (though somehow Acts of Volition is in there, categorised under "Audio Blogs" even though it's music based, which is probably a good thing) but you can add any podcast you want manually. Go to "Advanced" > "Subscribe to Podcast", enter the RSS feed URL and bingo, you're downloading, completely bypassing the Music Store and all the bullshit. In fact the store is really just an add-on, there if you need it but utterly ignorable. And best of all, the podcasts are all listed in their own section with the files stored in their own directory tree so they don't clog up your music library (always the downside to iPodder).

Once again, something from Apple that appears to be kinda shit but it actually really useful.

Afterthought: Maybe I'm thinking this is really good because I was expecting it to be awful, when in fact it's just pretty okay. Anyway, here's a more negative take which is worth a read. Not that I agree with a lot of it.

One of the things Andy Roberts did was make mix tapes for other people. Carefully tailored for the recipient with hand-made covers, you know the drill, you no doubt made a few yourself.

Paul Schroeder and Jenni Scott have digitized a few and Paul asked me if I'd be interested in hosting them. I of course said yes.

Here, then, are Andy's Mix Tapes with an RSS feed for podcasting or just to make sure you don't miss any, though bandwidth allowing they will be kept up for a few months. The first one is side A of Everyone Wants To Be Happy and they'll be posted up at most weekly, one side at a time along with the cover art and tracklistings where available.

It's also nice, in a strange way, to have Andy join the podcast station, which now has a name: Bonfire Radio. I checked it with the other 'casters and they approved so if you don't like it, tough.

Another show joins our merry band of podcasts. Welcome, if you will, Idiot Radio to which comparisons with Mark and Lard could be drawn, except they knew what they were doing whereas Steve Miller and Paul Rainey are kinda figuring it all out. The hard way. If you struggled through my early podcasts with the terrible audio and dodgy sound levels this will bring a sense of nostalgia. Steve knows all about music - he blogs about it for Donewaiting - while Paul pretends not to know all about music but he does really. Paul also does comics and very good they are too. Here's the Podcast RSS feed. Slap it in your podcasting application and let them know what you think, or at least encourage them to do another one.

The Podcast Radio Station (which still needs a decent name, dammit!) continues to grow with another addition. Welcome, if you will, Garen Ewing with his first show. I came across Garen's comics when I first discovered the small press and fanzine scene and have known him on and off now for at least 15 years. As well as an accomplished cartoonist (his Rainbow Orchid was a serious contender for book of the year last year) he's a musician, currently teaching himself the mandolin and theramin, and martial artist. He also, according to his online bio, has no belly button. Here's Garen's blog and the RSS feed for his podcast. Enjoy!

Back in January when I wrote my how to podcast guide, I concluded with a call to arms:

So here's an idea. If any of you lot (by which I mean people who read this that I actually know and consider friends in some way, tenuous or otherwise) want to put together shows of your own I'd be happy to host them and look after the syndication side of things... We could start a little radio station or something. It'd be cool. Let me know what you think.

Then last week I noticed on Assistant Blog that Jonathan was pondering doing a podcast. Since then was a darn good chance I would like any podcasting Jonathan was to produce I offered him some space to host the thing and to sort out an RSS feed, since such things aren't very easy to come by if you're skirting the boundaries of copyright infringement. And I mentioned this radio station idea. And he was up for all of it.

The mp3 came through today and, realising I suddenly had a whole new beast on my hands, I spent a few hours subtly shifting the emphasis of the Podcast sub-site away from me!me!me!, introducing a category system, re-jigging the feeds so that each podcast has equal billing and allowing for more to added with ease. And it's now ready to launch.

Subscribers to Pete Radio should notice no difference. The RSS feed remains the same (there are actually two now but they're identical so you don't need to re-subscribe to the new one) as do the URLs for the individual show pages. What's new is... well, here's a little map:

Podcast homepage | Combined RSS feed for all podcasts
- Assistant Podcast archives | RSS feed > individual shows
- Pete Radio archives | RSS feed > individual shows

Of note is that Jonathan's podcast is autonomous, as will any other podcasts that join the station be. His shows will not appear on the main page and comments made will not appear on my comments page. In theory he could syndicate this stuff out to his own site and do with it what he wants, just as I do with my podcasts. There's an interesting multi-directional hierarchical flow going on. The Podcast Station is run by me hence it living on my site as a subsection, but my shows on that site exist on a level footing with the others. I then take my show and feed it back up the tree to my personal stuff, ensuring that it only links back to my podcasts and not to the whole thing. Well, I find it interesting...

So, two things then. Firstly, if you've previously expressed an interest and I've shown interest in your interest, get your arse in gear as I now have a fully functional Podcast Station to accommodate it.

And secondly, I need a name. "Podcast Station" just doesn't have any ring to it at all. Suggestions in the comments please!

Oh, and do check out the inaugural Assistant Podcast. it's rather good. Shitloads better than my first effort, though that's not really saying much.

When I was taking my month off blogging in December I started Podcasting, as you might have noticed if you saw the box on the right hand column suddenly appear. Podcasting is just a fancy name for putting together your own radio show and sticking it on the net and how it's suddenly, well, exploded is probably being generous but let's say "risen in profile" with this fancy new name is a combination of utopian geekery and a lowering in technology barriers. Pretty much anyone can put one together and getting one out there isn't as hard as it might have been.

Though you wouldn't necessarily think so if you read the Endgadget guide to Podcasting. Admittedly Endgadget is aimed at people who like to take the scenic route and there's nothing wrong with that. But here's how I do it with a Mac running Panther using the basic iLife applications that come with it. In other words, very simply and for free.

Tom announces in pants-wetting mode that the BBC are releasing Radio 4's In Our Time in unencumbered mp3 format, which is great news for all the reasons he gives, but it's got me thinking.

The first R4 program to get the mp3 treatment was the 2004 Reith Lectures (no longer available I see, but I have them if anyone is desperate) which was presumably justified because of the public service angle of getting this material out to the widest possible number of people. I find it interesting that the next program they've chosen is possibly the most heavily intellectual 40 minutes put out on their entire network (with the possible exception of some late-night Radio 3 things). While incredibly worthy and important, and also very good indeed, there is nothing out there to compete with it. It's not highbrow in an elitist way but you have to pay attention and think while listening to it. It's intellectual. And that means it has no worth in the media world so the BBC can release it with no worries about it being further distributed around the net because who really cares?

As more and more radio programs are released in mp3 format it'll be interesting see which ones are chosen. I suspect it'll be those that have a solid public service educational agenda and that are as far away from the commercial networks as possible, the sort of things that are the BBC at its best but which are ignored by the wider media, political and general world as being necessary but not that interesting. When something mainstream and populist is released (say Radio 2 shows) then things will really kick off. In the meanwhile I'm happy though.

I'm loading a pallet onto the shrink-wrapping machine and the radio news catches my ear. I turn to the guy in the booth. You what? "Some people are going to be pretty upset about this" he says. Yeah, me being one of them. As Teenage Kicks starts it's unexpected stint as most playlisted song of the day I find myself slightly stunned, unable to compute this information. He'll never broadcast again. I'll never hear his show live again. Kids discovering music now and in the future will not have his guiding voice. It's over and it's too early, far too early.

I continued my work in a daze, making little mistakes and bumping my pallet truck into things, as it sunk in. I sent a couple of text messages to people I guessed hadn't heard and got bemused replies. Is this a wind up? A little later some guy is singing raucously along to Teenage Kicks obviously oblivious to why it's being played. That phrase, "some people are going to be pretty upset about this" is flowing through my mind. I'm probably the only person in this warehouse who's affected by the news.

I can't remember when I first heard his show. It was probably around 1989. I was 17, had just discovered The Pixies and was making up for some seriously lost time music-wise. Up until then my music taste had been pretty terrible, growing up in Croydon and listening to Capital Radio. As I moved to Winchester Radio One moved to FM and became my chosen station. At the time he was playing music in trios. A guitar track, a dance track, a world track, a guitar track and so on. I loved the guitar stuff, hated the dance stuff and was bemused by the world stuff, but I stuck with it. Soon I came to tolerate and eventually love the whole show, which is kind of the point.

Throughout the 90s I tended to be the only person in my immediate group of friends that listened to him. As time has progressed this has changed as when that identification is made one tends to have made a friend for life and this evening nearly every weblog I read has a post like this on it. I don't think he has fans as such or followers. Rather he made a certain frame of mind acceptable and this, I think, is his real legacy.

In fact I'll go out on a limb and say it's not really about the music. The music is a conduit for something else, something quite intangible which I think comes down to that fucked up sense of juxtaposition he imposed on us. He made having an open mind cool, which is saying something when you think about it. Once you'd accepted that you could listen to every form of every form of music and appreciate it on its own merits then you could apply this to everything else in life. Any form of creative endeavour is worthwhile. The fact that someone, anyone, is doing something different and interesting becomes vital.

On the whole fans (for want of a better word) of him tend to be sensitive folk who just want things to be nice, who feel beaten down by the relentless enforcement of mediocrity. He not only provided a place on the radio for us to retreat to, his spirit encouraged others to do the same. Every small club, fanzine, website, setup of any description that implicitly encourages people to just do stuff owes him a debt, and they know it. The generation, generations really, that grew up with him learned something important and it stuck with them. We're the ones who smile when we see enthusiasm, who know that there is so much more to life. We're the ones who get it.

John Peel, thank you.

So Jez is still hacking away at the Gmail Radio experiment and today presented me with an m3u playlist file that streams tracks grabbed offa Gmail and stored on his server, which was cool in itself except any ogg or m4a files were converted to mp3 and the text of the emails that accompanied them was turned into robot-speech. The end result was a radio show generated on the fly by a range of different people. Once you understand what's going on here the potential becomes clear and mildly exciting.

Take this slightly different model. There are lots of mp3 blogs out there hosting songs. Automatically grabbing the mp3 files and creating an audio stream would be easy but it misses an important aspect - what the blogger has written about the song in question. With this system you'd get all the tunes from a range of blogs automatically but also the comments that go with them. An audio version of a blog aggregator if you like. Of course you've still got the raw information about the song, who posted it, etc, so as you're listening to the stream you could check the site, see what's being played and follow the link back to the original post. Wouldn't that be cool?

All you'd need would be a server with half a gig or so of space and unlimited bandwidth (which, if I'm not very much mistaken, and I suspect I must be, you can get here for $15 a month) to run the program on. Get it to check a selection of mp3 blogs on a 6 hourly basis (say via their full feeds), grab the mp3 files and commentary, convert it into a stream and you've got an eclectic radio station with presenters talking about each song, all automatically generated.

A similar but quite different thing is going on at Radio Paradise, which I'd recommend you check out as it's what mainstream rock radio should be like if there was any justice in the world. (I've been listening to it for three hours straight if that's any recommendation.) Essentially just one couple, Rebecca and Bill Goldsmith, in the small town of Paradise, California choosing the tunes and programming the stream, but what takes it to the next level is the listener interaction. As the stream plays the current track is displayed on the main page. Follow this link and you're in a forum where members can comment and vote on the track. More interestingly is a second stream, the Listener Review Channel, featuring songs they're considering for the main playlist, usually suggested or uploaded by listeners, with a simple voting system in place. While the station is ultimately controlled by Bill and Rebecca and has their stamp all over it, this filtered listener interaction adds subtle layers to the experience not just for those involved in the fora but for the non-interacting listener as well.

The model I'm thinking of is again similar but different. The core would be the members only music sharing site mentioned yesterday which is a no-brainer but think about all the data it's generating. A lot of this can be thrown back into the mix as you'd expect but what's exciting me is the idea of using this selection of music generated by a large-ish pool of folk to create some kind of external service. A public radio station that's above board and legal generating cash by whatever means are applicable which gets fed back into the community. And it's all run by robots.

Cool, huh?

So I set up the Gmail account for sharing mp3s as mentioned last week, gave the login to a few friends and it's all be going swimmingly. (If I haven't told you about it, no offense. I've just been randomly going through my chums, all of whom are compartmentalised differently in my mind, picking out those whose music tastes I know and probably missing key folk. Sorry if I've slighted you.) Basically we're abusing the Gmail service in a most blatant way and if the account doesn't get shut down at some point in the near future I'll be amazed. What with 20+ people all logging on to the same account from different addresses, sometimes at the same time they're bound to notice. That's if they care, of course, and plenty of other people are abusing the Gmail service in varying degrees. At least we're seeing the ads unlike those who are using it as a virtual drive. Although Jez isn't - he's hacked a way of downloading the mp3s and automatically streaming them, and to top it all his system converts the emails into speech and streams them too, which is rather boggling when you experience it. Like some kind of community radio take to it's logical extreme where every listener is a presenter.

Why do this? Well, other than that it's cool and fun I have in the space of a couple of days magically created an online community that works. That we're infringing copyright is a mere unfortunate byproduct (and since it's a closed network not really a huge problem) - the point is it's the music that binds it all together. It's been said many times but it bears repeating that music has some kind of fundamental importance to the human condition, be it singing along to the radio on the factory floor, going to clubs, concerts and gigs, sitting around a fire with a guitar or sharing tapes and now mp3s with your mates. If I was going to create a community I'd build it around music, even if I wanted to get other stuff out of it. Music is the foundation - talk about other things will come from that foundation on its own.

This Gmail experiment (and seeing as it's probably not going to be sustainable long term once a few hundred people get on board it's definitely an experiment) along with the seeming ease with which Jez has hacked cool things out of it has made me think more about developing this kind of community into something that isn't wedged somewhat uncomfortably onto an email service. In essence it'd be a closed members only site (membership gained by invite only) laid out in a similar way to MetaFilter. Songs are listed in a pile system where once the limit is reached the bottom one is deleted to make space (which might sound familiar to some people...) That much is straightforward and nothing new really, but it's the essential basics on which to build. Some of the developments will be planned out (such as a streaming radio service) but most of them will just evolve and the most interesting ones will probably come about independently of the site itself as people meet new people and stuff, be is music or more likely something else, happens.

The main stumbling block will be paying for the storage and bandwidth but that's surmountable given the community aspect and by keeping it small (500 members should do it and a fiver a year to cover costs isn't too steep). The other problem will be security. Sites like this that I've seen tend to be web-only and introducing audio streams and the like that can be played in apps like iTunes is going to be tricky to keeps members only. The trick will be keeping it secret, so if it does come to pass (and if it does it won't be for quite a while) you won't hear about it here. First and second rules...

A few years ago the Evolution Control Committee had, amongst their wonderful audio archive, a load of full length radio shows hosted by one Grootnik P Bargelights. Having brief access to broadband around that time I downloaded all 21 of these two hour shows, stuffed them onto a couple of CDRs and quite enjoyed them.

GPB is a strange beast. Imagine, if you will, a cross between a Muppet and Wolfman Jack, only with a love of the so-bad-it's-good, thrift store field of music, without the irony, delivered deadpan. Now listen to one of them.

Oh, sorry, you can't. Understandably the ECC haven't kept the 800MB of mp3s on their site as I discovered when I wanted to link to them a while back. A shame, as these radio shows kept me seriously entertained while on the farm. But wait! My wonderful hosting company recently upgraded my account at no extra cost and I've got 100MB just sitting there waiting for me to fill it with some exciting new project or other. Hmm...

So, in for the next couple of months I'll be uploading 2-3 Grootnik P Bargelights shows every Monday for you to download and enjoy at your leisure.

(This is sadly all over now. If anyone has 800meg free and wants to host the files do get in touch)

Which does sound rather painful but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Popism, a blog that quite pleasently surprised me to the level where I'm rather distressed to see how infrequently it's updated, has a nice wee collection of interesting radio shows available online. Since the permalinks ain't working I'll take the liberty of cutnpasting in full:

Since getting broadband, we've been marvelling at the wonders of online radio: why suffer Sara Cox in the mornings when you can enjoy avante-garde sound installations with your cornflakes (thank you Resonance)? Protein stream a range of leftfield shows from the likes of Nag Nag Nag as well as the charmingly named Mullet Disco. Until its untimely demise just over a year ago, Ammocity provided superb broadcasts from dozens of the best DJs and clubs. Let's hope they live up to that with their relaunch. Ninja Tune's Solid Steel shows have been banished from BBC London but survive online, including archive shows. Warp Records host a variety of out-there electronica broadcasts, including an excellent Chris Morris mix. Totally Radio host programmes from Artrocker and Careless Talk Costs Lives.

Quality service there. I'm currently listening to a long recording of someone seemingly sandpapering something on Resonance and life has become that fraction more worth living for as a result.

Update: Just had a mail from Richard who runs Popism informing a similar blog No Rock and Roll Fun which is updated every minute by the looks of it and is very readable indeed, even if you're not 100% familiar with some of the popular beat combos under analysis. Music blogs, hmm... Not something I've paid too much attention to before...

Start the Week on Radio 4 today had a stellar line-up of guests. Marina Warner was particularly fascinating with her history of the $ symbol. Peter Ackroyd, Anne Widdecombe and Griff Rhys Jones are also on.

Well worth 45 minutes of your time, the program is archived for the next week.