Deciding on music for the podcast
I’ve been asked by a good number of people over the last few months, “Where’s the podcast?” and “When will the next podcast be out?” Every time I’ve said “Next week” or “In a couple of weeks” and meant it, however it’s almost 4 months now since the last one and I somehow feel people don’t think another one is coming. I’d like to have people put that notion aside; there will be another episode. I was actually listening to prospective songs for futures shows earlier and I thought to myself “Why not explain the process I go through to pick the music for the show?” Granted, this doesn’t get the next episode done, but at least this will give you an idea of the work behind it.
Finding the music
I find the music to play from various places. When I first started I would occasionally I hear a song I liked on other podcasts and then go and look at the website of the artist (if they had one) to see if they had any other tracks to download. I still do that every so often, however I’ve become more organised in recent months.
I now use a number of feeds to tell me when new sites release new music, and I also use enclosures to allow me to download the music directly through my aggregator (in my case, NetNewsWire, henceforth NNW). If I find that I go back to a site more than a couple of times in my browser then I write a small script to generate a feed for that site and I then subscribe to it in NNW. This saves me so much time in that NNW does the work for me rather than having to spend hours checking each site every few days myself.
At the time of writing I have 28 feeds up and running, some for individual labels, some for general sites, such as smart-music.net (which is currently down). I also have a folder in my bookmarks for sites I check manually and which I need to write feeds for when I have the time and inclination.
Filtering the music
The process of deciding on what gets on to the podcast and what gets dumped is not that complicated, however it is fairly drawn out. I start by adding the music I’ve downloaded with NNW (or via the browser) to iTunes and giving them all a grouping, such as “Free mp3s”, so that I can easily group them with smart lists. Adding the group causes all of the tunes to appear in the “Free mp3s” smart list which lists all music in that group with no rating. I can then play these tracks, on either the computer or on the iPod, and decide what to do with them. In order to help me keep track I use the rating system and follow a simple number of rules…
- If I’m not sure about a track I leave it unrated.
- Tracks I want to delete get a rating of 1 star.
- Tracks which have potential get a rating of 2 stars.
- Tracks which I will definitely play on the show get a 3 star rating.
After syncing the iPod with the computer a number of other smart lists come into play. One lists the tracks which have a 1 star rating and which can be deleted. Another lists the 2 star rating tracks so that I can listen to them again and weed out some more. The last list is the definite lists which lists all of the 3 star rated songs.
While the system is relatively simple the practical numbers are what makes it a larger task. A few months ago I worked out that I let only 8% of songs through from the initial download stage to the “Definites” list. This means that I need to listen to 100 tracks to find just 8 for the podcast, which is fairly scary. I tend to let about 25% of tracks through to the “potentials” list before discarding two-thirds of those on further listening (usually as I say “What was I thinking?”)
100 to 25 to 8, which gets me just enough tracks for a show. Maybe I should be less picky, I don’t know. Overall I’m happy enough with the process, although I did notice that it slowed down when I changed jobs as I lost out on the time I was spending waiting at bus stops and train stations and travelling. The delay between shows is not down to this process though, it’s just down to sheer laziness, something I’m working to change.