El Seaño :: Tecnología

I listen to a fair few podcasts. Some of them are quite long, and it becomes a pain in the arse trying to flick between segments of the show while driving and talking on my mobile phone at the same time.

So last night, I was replacing the lightbulb above my toilet, when I slipped, hit my head on the creamy porcellin surface, and suddenly had this idea in my head.

An MP3 ID3v2 tag which describes chapters! It's so simple!

The contents could be Xml, coz thats easy to read, and it could go something like this (taking G'Day World #6 as an example):

<chapters>
<chapter timecode="0:00">G’Day World intro with tune “D24″ courtesy of Melbourne band Spruiker</chapter>
<chapter timecode="0:20">The Australian National Anthem</chapter>
<chapter timecode="2:00">What we did for Australia Day</chapter>
<chapter timecode="4:45">Mick’s judging the Business Blogging Awards</chapter>
<chapter timecode="9:00">Cameron’s infamous IM conversation</chapter>
<chapter timecode="17:30">One of us is going to DEMO@15</chapter>
<chapter timecode="20:15">The sponsorship auction</chapter>
<chapter timecode="25:15">Rant about The Blog Business Summit in Seattle</chapter>
</chapters>


Support for this in an iPod and other audio devices would be awesome. Failing that, we could have some post-processing, whereby the MP3 is split up into chapters (or not, depending on the user's preferences), and then sent to iTunes for iPodification.

Voilla, we have chapters within podcasts. Think of the convienience people! I'm going to start writing a dotnet library to support this soon.