As a DJ you quite often ask yourself the question: “How on earth can I keep up with all the new releases?”. There are so many record stores and many of them have clumsy Flash players for listening to the sample clips. I mainly check the new releases from Beatport, Digital Tunes and Track It Down, which all utilize a Flash player, and as usual they are not that brilliant.
Fortunately the new Web 2.0 technologies provide a solution to all of the problems we didn’t even know about, even this one! The solution to the issue in hand: News feeds (RSS/Atom)! All of the stores listed above publish feeds from the releases that are available in the stores. By subscribing to these feeds with a feed reader e.g. Firefox, Opera (or Akregator if you’re on Linux as I am) you will be kept up to date with all of the new stuff that arrives to the stores!
Sounds nice doesn’t it? Well, it is, but things could be even better. There is another nifty technology that has received nearly as much hype as the Web 2.0 itself and that is Podcast. For the ones who are not familiar with Podcasts, a short summary: Podcasts are news feeds that have a audio file enclosed to them. So what is the point in here then? The nice point about Podcasts is that it is a so called “push” -media. What this means then is that you don’t have to go to a page and check if there are new posts there, instead you get a notice of new content similarly to receiving emails. And the really neat thing in here is that you don’t have to use a web browser to get a list of the new releases and click a link to open the sample in your media player, but rather can check all the new stuff straight from your media player! Media players that support Podcasts include at least iTunes and Winamp (and of course Amarok if you’re on Linux).
Now cutting to the real chase: the problem here. The thing is you see, that these RSS feeds are just RSS feeds and have not been done with Podcast readers in mind. This means in the case of Digital Tunes that the samples are not enclosed to the feed items (a really weird decision not to include them), so you have to click the link in the posts to open the info page for that release where you are able to listen to the clips. Beatport on the other hand has thought that it would be nice to include also cover images with the posts. Sounds like a nice feature, but at least Amarok gets confused by this double enclosure and tries to play the jpeg image… a endeavor which probability of success is quite slim.
I have been thinking on how to resolve this issue for a while now. Finally yesterday I had time to actually do something about this. I wrote a few short scripts that get all the info needed from the RSS feeds and the info pages and then crunch all this info to a nice little Podcast. As I think this is quite a useful thing I thought I’d share the fruits of my labor with all you. So here are the links to the Podcasts:
Beatport drum & bass new releases
Beatport drum & bass Top 100
Beatport dubstep new releases
Beatport dubstep Top 100
Digital Tunes drum & bass new releases
Digital tunes dubstep new releases
Redeye drum & bass new releases
Redeye dubstep new releases
Redeye charts
Track it Down drum & bass new releases
Track it Down dubstep new releases
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btw. The digital tunes feeds don’t have pubDates which makes updating the podcast more difficult. Because of this you might get problems when updating the podcast list.