Metafilter Music Podcast?

March 30, 2009 6:19 PM

Has anyone thought about doing a periodic podcast of tunes exclusively from music.metafilter? Would Metafilter or any of the artists have an issue with someone doing this? Would anyone want to host it or help in other ways? Would anyone listen to it?
posted by rollbiz to MetaFilter-related at 6:19 PM (38 comments total)

Heh. We were just talking about this in the thread for the most recent podcast, and, yeah, I'm seriously considering trying to start one up. I'm thinking about a half hour or so, 4-6 songs plus ideally a quickie interview with a mefite musician, ideally doing it approximately every other week as a sort of "off-week" podcast between the main episodes.

Very thumbnail sketch at the moment, but I think it's doable and it could be a lot of fun.
posted by cortex at 6:25 PM on March 30

Yeah, that's what prompted my post but I neglected to cite your conversation. I also think it'd would be fun, I was thinking about it because this is the first Metafilter podcast I've listed to in a while and it was reminding me that I don't spend nearly enough time over at music.metafilter.

I'd do it myself but I have Garage Band, a shitty mic, and a lack of l33t skillz so y'all would probably do it much better.
posted by rollbiz at 6:29 PM on March 30

I saw "periodic" "podcast" and "tunes" and I got very excited about listening to songs and commentary on the topic of chemistry.

</NERD>
posted by DU at 6:36 PM on March 30

If you subscribe to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/mefi/Music , you'll get everything already. Not the same as what cortex was talking about, obviously, but good if you just want to hear the songs.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 6:56 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

DU: Perhaps this will tide you over for a while.

Since I suggested it to cortex, I felt like I oughta go over and poke around for some content ideas.
I did not know:

• Music Challenges have their own playlist pages.
• Music has its own talk, which is, like, a million times nice than MeTa.
• Metafilter's entry-level tool for people who don't know if they want to make music is A nintendo DS.
• Favorites aren't the be-all-end-all of approval in Music. They have charts.

posted by boo_radley at 6:57 PM on March 30 [2 favorites]

As an addendum to my link above, whilst the one I gave will give you ALL of mefi music, and I happily subscribe to it, you may, like me, find that http://www.metafilter.com/user/17479/musicpostsrss covers the essentials quite nicely.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 7:41 PM on March 30 [2 favorites]

One bad idea I've had already is that, whenever possible, I'd love to have the episode guest do a super-brief and possibly improvised-under-duress intro theme for the podcast. Because that shit would be dope and/or hilarious.
posted by cortex at 7:45 PM on March 30 [5 favorites]

One bad idea I've had already is that, whenever possible, I'd love to have the episode guest do a super-brief and possibly improvised-under-duress intro theme for the podcast.

Yes oh God yes. I would make an amazing fool of myself.
posted by ORthey at 7:53 PM on March 30

Aha! I see there's actually a whole new thread about this! I'll reprint this comment then, from the discussion in the current MeTa podcast-related thread:

I also think that (given the general inattention from other MeFiers that the subsite has received since its inception) the proposed off-week Music-centric podcast should not only feature a selection of the most recent song posts, but should also go back through the archives and spotlight music from further back, cause unlike many posts to the blue or gray, MeFiMu posts don't become dated. Most are still just as fresh and attention-worthy as the day they were posted.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 7:55 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

A panel show, ala The Mclaughlin Group! "First up! Frenetic: America's most talented Canadian? Flapjax!" Flapjax at Midnight does a spit-take "Chococat!" "Yes, I think so." "Next up, banjos!"
posted by boo_radley at 8:01 PM on March 30 [2 favorites]

I wholeheartedly support this idea.
posted by danb at 8:02 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

I actually formally volunteer for this. I've been looking for a project, and this was one of my ideas.
posted by potch at 9:01 PM on March 30

This is my idea for the format:

once every 2 weeks (at minimum), I would feature anywhere between 5-8 stand out tracks posted since the last podcast, as well as 1 or two "deep cuts" from the archive. Brief commentary and douchebaggery from myself and possible guests would punctuate the production. It would be hosted offsite, but I would likely post a link and notes in MuTalk as a thread, as well as posting it as a project.
posted by potch at 9:06 PM on March 30

Yeah, a la flapjax at midnite's proposal...That's kind of also what I had in mind. I work a few music podcasts and so although my skillset is pretty limited, one thing I am good at is going and digging out the gems of the past.

So, I would hope that cortex's podcast would cover old material as well, or I would have to found a competing podcast which denigrated and slanderized his at each and every opportunity as being the station of the Johnny-come-latelys... :)
posted by rollbiz at 9:21 PM on March 30

potch, I think you/I/cortex/whoever should probably talk this through at some point since we all seem to have visions which are different but mostly complementary. Yeah?
posted by rollbiz at 9:23 PM on March 30

And yes, thanks to those above who have suggested good ways to follow the music on Metafilter. This will be useful no matter what happens vis a vis sweet podcasts.
posted by rollbiz at 9:24 PM on March 30

but should also go back through the archives and spotlight music from further back

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I'm trying to finish mixing an EP for a friend of mine this week but will try to sneak in some ideation for a "pilot" of the podcast I have in mind to see if there's any unexpected difficulties or gotchas involved. If it seems like something I'm gonna be comfortable and willing to execute, I may just run with it to see what happens, but I've got no problem with talking out details and (if it seems necessary or helpful) splitting up the labor somehow.

Sweet-ass podcasts are definitely the core goal here.
posted by cortex at 9:27 PM on March 30

Behind the cereal boxes in the pantry you find a jar, covered in dust. It's old, brown pharmacy glass. You can't see what's inside it. Taking it out, you read the label, which looks mimeographed: "Down-home relaxed style ~ folksy musing on what's what ~ Cortex's sweet-ass podcasts"
posted by boo_radley at 9:37 PM on March 30 [2 favorites]

♬, ♪.
posted by not_on_display at 10:00 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

Possibly helpful or relevant is the MeMu podcast I made for a bit - here's the blog, and the related MeTa.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:32 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

Shit, upon perusal it would appear that the dirty bastards at podOmatic have removed the actual mp3 files from their servers.

Yet I still get spam from them.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:33 PM on March 30

I would very much like to see this, bandwidth costs permitting, which I mentioned a couple of hours ago. tl;dr -- Radio Metafilter.

I pretty much just want to hear music, not people talking about the music. Much as I may like those people, and I do have great fondness for the concept of the Mass Amateurization of Everything, if the world of podcasting has shown us anything, it's that most people don't actually sound as good when recorded extemporizing as they think they might.

Not that a casting of the pods, or a whole host of them, wouldn't be peachy keen or potentially even superawesome, but it'd still be cool to have an m3u to just fire up when I was so inclined.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:53 AM on March 31

Hurrah for this awesome idea.

(Especially as I have not yet fixed the music.mefi crashes my browser problem, which is to do with too many embedded flash players on a single page causing my old and cranky machine to fall over.)
posted by motty at 3:01 AM on March 31

This is a great idea. How about 12-15 tracks monthly with commentary kept to a minimum? I don't have time to get the best from music.meta, but a digest of the best of what is posted there would be fantastic.
posted by fire&wings at 3:37 AM on March 31

Has anyone thought about doing a periodic podcast of tunes exclusively from music.metafilter?

Yes.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:11 AM on March 31

DU: "I saw "periodic" "podcast" and "tunes" and I got very excited about listening to songs and commentary on the topic of chemistry."

Cortex: Welcome to the off-week MetaFilter chemistry podcast. I'm cortex..
Jessamyn: ..and I'm jessamyn. On this episode of the podcast, the fourth in our five-part series on group 13, the inimitable boron group. This week: indium!
C: I'm really excited. In the first half of the show, we'll be interviewing the long-missing quonsar. It turns out he has spent the last year trying to formulate a childrens toy out of an indium-gallium alloy. It's liquid at room temperature and far less toxic than mercury, but it's got its own little foibles.
J: You know that sounds a lot like quonsar himself.
C: Hah! I'll be sure to ask him what chemical he thinks you're like.
posted by Plutor at 5:02 AM on March 31 [6 favorites]

This idea has my full support, and a little extra if at least one show features Cortexahowipinta doing commentary as The Culps a la SNL. And that show could feature, perhaps, only songsmith tracks, and the show ends with a live admin rendition of Punch'em in the Dick.
posted by empyrean at 5:05 AM on March 31

I really like this idea, I agree that it should also cover old songs and I really like stavrosthewonderchicken's idea of a Metafilter radio, which would be more complicated, I guess, but it would be really great.

And this might be a good time as any to ask for a little feature request for Music that might make it easier to explore old songs. Would be possible to have a page with the names of every Mefite that has ever posted a song as a link to their songs? This would look similar to the "archives by date", only with usernames.

The reason why I think this is warranted is because there are some awesome songs that were posted by people who aren't regulars, and so it's really hard to find them. If there was a list with the names of the Mefites, we could focus on the ones that are not familiar to us while searching, and a lot of the old gems would not be lost. Would that be possible, or a hell to implement?
posted by micayetoca at 5:39 AM on March 31

tl;dr -- Radio Metafilter.

posted by stavrosthewonderchicken

Another great idea. I humbly suggest Last.FM -- they're apparently pretty easy to deal with for small labels and individual artists (see the FAQ on Label Services).
posted by boo_radley at 7:22 AM on March 31

Not that a casting of the pods, or a whole host of them, wouldn't be peachy keen or potentially even superawesome, but it'd still be cool to have an m3u to just fire up when I was so inclined.

I like the idea of Radio Metafilter but have no idea what the logistics of that sort of thing would be. If someone with a clear idea about implementation wants to lay out some details, I'm totally interested to here them.

But, barring that, there's a decent way to fire up some random mefi music already: http://music.metafilter.com/randomized.mefi. That'll give you 50 tracks at random in a player, different every time it loads, which should be like 2-3 hours of music at a go.

If there's some value in having a like m3u-generating variant of that or something, we could probably make it happen. I'm sure people have different music-listening procedures than me, so I'm not sure what's useful vs. not on that front.
posted by cortex at 7:28 AM on March 31 [2 favorites]

This would look similar to the "archives by date", only with usernames.

I think that's a really good idea, yeah.
posted by cortex at 7:30 AM on March 31

Would definitely listen to this!
posted by mannequito at 7:57 AM on March 31

I also vote for this. Thanks to the last podcast, I just bought one of frenetic's albums, and I'm going to be queuing up memusic tunes for my listening happiness today.
posted by rtha at 8:32 AM on March 31

I like the idea of Radio Metafilter but have no idea what the logistics of that sort of thing would be.

Actually, I used to do that too, when some fine friendly folks were kind enough to let me participate in their LoudCity/Shoutcast/Don't quite remember what it was technically project. I think MeCha had a similar thing going on over in their neck of the woods, too.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:45 PM on March 31

I'm totally in for a mefi music podcast. I'm clueless about how to do it, but I'm willing to help out if I have an skills that can be put to use.
posted by dejah420 at 5:39 PM on April 2

This would look similar to the "archives by date", only with usernames.

This is now in place on the bottom of the Music Archive page.
posted by cortex at 6:39 PM on April 2 [1 favorite]

Yoooooooooooooohoooooooooooo, thank you very much cortex and pb!!
posted by micayetoca at 7:57 PM on April 2

Nice going on the archives list, y'all. Thanks!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:02 PM on April 2