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February 03, 2005

Podcast Review: Starfrosch Podcast

This entry posted in: 3 and a half stars , I subscribe , Podcast Review

Starfrosch Audioblog :: Podcast :: Netlabel in English

Starfrosch in German

Format: stand-alone music tracks
Content: Electronica, Drum & Base, Ambient, TripHop, Techno, Rock ... you get the point
Rating: 3 and a half stars
What I'm going to do: subscribe
Typical Length: varies widely - from a minute to over 2 hours

The Starfrosch podcast is a new kind of podcast for me to review. Basically simply an RSS feed of music tracks of various types, it shares features of the IndieFeed podcasts. But on IndieFeed there's typically a little bit of human commentary for each track - a tiny bit of background or at the least a contextual frame that indicates this is an IndieFeed track. The lack of a context for the 'casts from Starfrosch is a little disconcerting to start with; listening blithely along to a playlist of podcasts only to encounter a seemingly random musical track can be surprising. I would have preferred a little context for these files, although that would be likely to be useless since I don't speak German. A side-effect of the nature of this podcast was that I had to consider my personal definition of podcasting with respect to The New, New Podcast Review (if you care to, you can see it here).

The music that Markus puts together for podcast is widely varied in nature as well as in quality. As can be expected, some of it is excellent, and other of it less so, but what was less expected was the wildly divergent audio quality. Seemingly without regard to the encoded bit-rate the music varies in audio clarity - some relatively high bit-rate files are also highly distorted while others are low in bit-rate but sound adequate. Of course this may be intentional - I am not familiar with all of the music the Starfrosch podcasts, so the distortion may be part of the art but in some cases it definitely detracts from my enjoyment of the music either way. I suspect that Markus is at least somewhat constrained by the source material he has as far as quality is concerned, but the tracks enclosed in the Starfrsch podcast are also encoded at bit-rates all over the map, from 0kbps (okay, that was probably an unsuccessful download) to 64kbps to 320kbps (no, really!). In addition, the 'casts vary in length from around a minute to almost 3 hours (Markus apparently podcasts some full-length radio-shows).

One really nice thing about Starfrosch is that there is an RSS feed for each of the different categories of music that Markus 'casts as well as one for all of the music (the one referenced below). There are too many to list here, but you can explore the site to find the ones you want (unfortunately I did not see a page that aggregated links to all of the distinct feeds). Another nice side-effect is that if you like the music and want to keep a copy (which is apparently OK) then you don't need to trim any extraneous audio from it.

Since there's no talk, it's difficult for me to rate this podcast in terms of delivery or production values. Track lengths are also unimportant, since the 'cast is the track. File-naming is all over the map, like the audio quality and bit-rate - some tracks are well documented and others have nothing of any value in the filename or other meta-data. While I expect that Markus only controls a small portion of that, it would be nice to have the files tagged as being from the Starfrosch podcast channel somewhere in the ID3 tags (perhaps under album, since that is commonly visible from portable player displays).

Subscribe to mp3s.

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Posted by cori at February 3, 2005 04:46 PM