(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)
New Programs This Week
Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.
This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:
We received donations of nearly $2,000 in the IT Conversations Tip Jar during the month of April, and this week I’ll be distributing those proceeds to Team ITC. But in the past two weeks, those donations have started falling off and already May is on a track for far fewer dollars to feed the machine.
We thank all of you who have contributed to our team of volunteers who produce most of IT Conversations’ shows in their spare time, and hope that the rest of you will dig into your pockets to help keep IT Conversations able to bring you our programs.
It took much longer than I hoped, but the first (May 1) IT Conversations Media Kit is now available to qualified underwriters and sponsors. If you’d like to support the #1 audio tech network, please send email to doug@itconversations.com.
As I mentioned three months ago, it looks like we may have to stop delivering .m4b (AAC) versions of IT Conversations audio files. Only about 10% of listeners download the AAC files, and the only significant benefit (other than a slight increase in quality as compared to the MP3s) is that they can be bookmarked on iPods and in iTunes. Unfortunately we have not been able to find an AAC “joiner” that will allow us to splice together already-encoded files as we can do for MP3s. (Does anyone know of such a utility?)
A solution would be for one of our enterprising listeners who knows AppleScript to develop a script that automatically converts files of Genre=Podcast to AAC within iTunes, then deletes the originals. A script like that would be great for iTunes/iPod users for all podcasts, not just IT Conversations.
To be honest, the bookmarking functionality should be built into every player, and there’s no reason it couldn’t be implemented for MP3 files as well.