Auto created podcasts anyone?

We’ve been experimenting with weird and wonderful stuff today and it’s looking good. A few weeks ago someone here mentioned how great it would be to easily create a ‘best of the month’ podcast from audioboos people had created. That way it’s just one download in iTunes and you get a quick caffeine fueled highlight of the month.

One small suggestion during beer has now turned into a massive, totally metadata driven experiment to do just that – but without any human intervention on the rather dull process of editing stuff together. We’ve just successfully completed the first live test by tagging random bits of content from the last 20 days and running a script that found the original files and auto compiled them – with crossfades – into a single podcast. I had to pull the finished result off the server manually and upload it using the new upload ability but the concept has been proven.

So, if you can do that with tags, you can repeat the process with people you follow, with featured boos and boos by location. In fact, you should potentially be able to create a podcast – or a radio program – using any bit of the metadata we collect.

Thanks to all those people whose audio we used: @flashboy @channel4news @britisharmy @heatherataylor @markusrill @Jason_Cobb @bdoaccountant @documentally @caulkinTheTimes @ash_matadeen @tonyblackburn @se1 @benjamin_cook @bbcoutlook @psmith @blueswirl and, of course, the boobot at the end.

Personalised audio programs just got a little bit closer…

Update
And we’ve just tried the same experiment with time limited boos from a single account. Very rough but this one also includes some testing on finding audio silence and ending the recording if it’s longer than some mad equation the team came up with!

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