As I use my homebrew python mp3 player (stapl) more and more during my commutes, I’m struck by how truly useful one of it’s features is for a certain kind of listening.

I’m very much enjoying the new wave of content being made available via podcasts. (Listening to the ones from KCRW makes you realize just how nice it is to have good audio production values!) I’m also enjoying a lot of audio books — some fiction, and some lecture series from universities on history, philosophy, and other topics. On top of that, I still do like to listen to music.

So depending on what I’m doing in my car (or if I’m at work) I may want to be listening to something of a different “flavor”. If there are people in the car, we want to talk, but music is nice. If I’m in heavy traffic, something a bit lighter that I don’t have to pay too much attention to would be fun — podcasts work well. Driving long distances? I want something that’ll get me engaged, keep me energized. Lecture series or fiction, coming right up. Writing code? The ambient stuff is good. Building a computer? Again, podcasts fit the bill well.

The great thing I sort of accidentally discovered in putting per-directory state-tracking and playlists in stapl is that now I have playlists — into which I automatically put “bookmarks”. (Not just what track I played last, but where in that track I was.) So the lecture’s making me sleepy? Pop, switch over to some podcasts. When I flip back to the “lecture playlist” later on, I’m right where I left off. Maybe jog back a minute or so for context. Or pick up a friend and want to kill the book I’m listening to? No problem.

Anyway, I really enjoy the freedom and flexibility it’s given me. I’m wondering if any players built into portable (well, more portable than my laptop) audio devices have anything like this? I know our ipod preserves our “where I left off” state, but I don’t think it does that for multiple ‘playlist points’. That’s actually a big one for us and why I started using my laptop as a jumbo-ipod in the first place — I’d be listening to an audiobook on the way to work, bring the ipod home and Amber would grab it to go work out. I’d come back and be staring at a list of 51 chapters of Harry Potter having no idea which chapter I was at, and even less how far into it. (Not Amber’s fault of course — just pointing out what seems like a shortcoming of the design.)

I suspect as we start using portable audio players for more than just music, and in increasingly different but discrete “modes”, a feature like this will creep into mainstream players. I hope so!

Update: It looks like you can indeed do this, to a limited extent and with some nasty caveats, on the ipod.

1. Concatenate your whole ‘playlist’ (e.g. a whole audiobook) into a single track.
2. Transcode that to apple’s AAC format. (You get a file named .m4a.)
3. Rename that file to .m4b

That’s apparently the ‘secret setting’ used to engage the ipod’s bookmark feature — any time you switch to or away from that file, it stores the current position in it. So to implement my idea above, you’d have to script the creation/concatenation of your playlists, then either figure out a way in linux to create .m4a files (a quick google suggests maybe) or bring them into itunes and do the conversion there. Then you could have a ‘podcasts’ playlist, and one for each book/lecture series/whatever you were listening to.

It also appears that audible has figured out yet another setting that lets you have chapter bookmarks within those bookmarkable files, so when you hit the right arrow it jumps, like a DVD, to the next ‘chapter.’ That would be extra extra slick if, for example, you’d concatenated all the podcasts.

Apr 21, 08:05 PM − Posted in Tech