Yikes, 3 posts in a day!?!

Well, I promised another post today, and you get two. I did find a bad photo of myself from my web cam. I will try to get a better photo later.

I am downloading the South by Southwest file. Right now I am at 1.11 gig into the 2.6 gig file. I am going to take my laptop back to my router tonight and let it go all night long. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I will have it all.

Gimme 3!
It's Friday so over at 24 Knits they have their Friday Gimme 3:

* List 3 things you've done that I probably haven't
Lost about 12 hours of my memory after a bicycle accident (long before the big helmet push)
Direct dialed a BBS long distance
Ran an offset printing press

* Tell me 3 things in your life that make you happy
Music
My friends
Walking

* Tell me the last 3 things you did to treat yourself
Bought my Creative Labs Zen Xtra
Went for a walking vacation
Bought a drum

More on podcasting and playlists

I talked earlier today about my attempts at playing with my iTunes smart playlists to pick up my unplayed podcasts at work. I use iTunes at work, even though I am a Windows guy, because I am on Windows 2000, which uses Window Media Player (WMP) 9.0 and smart play lists will not work quite right on it.

However as I have been working with playlists and I find them more and more useless. Now I will be the first to admit that I am probably a little more demanding than your typical user since I am a programmer. However I can't be the only person who gets frustrated. Here are a few of my pet peeves:

1) Sharing seems limited. Getting an iTunes smart play list into WMP? Yea, ok. I've not tried it, but my guess is it not easy, or more likely not doable. We need to be able to share smart play lists with anyone regardless of their playback software.

2) Can I have some boolean logic? One of my early complaints was about the multiple genres that natively come in. So what I would have loved would have been able to say "include (podcasts or other) and playcount is 0." Or how about both an include & exclude list so you don't get any audiobooks that may fall into other criteria?

3) We need to get the tempo of the music to come down with all the other info when we rip music. My Zen Nomad has a tempo tag, but nothing has come down when I rip a CD. This would be nice because then you could do a playlist of up tempo songs for workouts.

4) We need to have a way to prioritize a playlist. Things seem to get added somewhat randomly. It would be nice to have an option to shuffle with some kind of priority. For example I would like to do a random play list but give priority to any song that has a play count of 0. That way I would listen to the new stuff on my Zen easier. Again I could also see using tempo in a priority so that, say on Friday, you could play some more up tempo stuff.

5) We need to be able to build our own format. Adam Curry had mentioned that radio stations have software that allows the creation of a format that would randomly select music within select criteria. As an example, you might run an 80s song first, then maybe a current top 10, then maybe a 60s song, and so on. Wouldn't it be cool if we could do that? Right now I take and move things around in my playlist since some of the podcasts come in once a week, mix in some shorter stuff with longer stuff, or I may want to move the daily horoscope up to the top. It would be nice if I could have the playlist auto order, somewhat, for me. This could also tie in with the priority above so that you could get the podcasts to come up in the playlists in the right date order but not in a row. This would, essentially, give us the ability to create our own little talk radio stations.