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January 18, 2005
Podcast Review: The (In)Famous Green Dragon Radio Show
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3 and a half stars
, I subscribe
, Podcast Review
The (In)Famous Green Dragon Radio Show
Format: radio show
Content: unsigned music from the UK
Rating: 
What I'm going to do: subscribe
Typical Length: 1-1/2 to 2 hours
Green Dragon produces one very British music show for your listening pleasure. And a pleasure it is as well.
GD puts together a weekly 2 hour long festival of the best in unsigned bands in Great Britain. There seems to be no shortage of talent to be had there. While any music podcast focusing on unsigned musicians is going to have a wide variety of quality, the bands on Green Dragon's show are for the most part very good. The variety of music GD lays in any one show is quite brilliant as well; he really mixes it up, throwing punk, rock, blues, pop, and techno together to create a surprisingly cohesive pastiche of musical genres. With the length of the show, GD is able to fit between 20 and 30 tracks in each weekly event, and he rarely repeats artists within a show, so the listener gets maximum exposure to as many different artists as possible.
Green Dragon's patter is pretty well put together as well, and he provides podcatchers with some decent band-related information, almost always including where the band is located (although I'm not sure what use that information is). The website also contains the playlist for the current show, as well as that for archived shows, all of which can be downloaded directly from the site.
Green Dragon's production values are ambitious, but not altogether successful. GD tries hard, it seems, to make the show come off like a broadcast radio show, and he does a pretty good job. However, his intro clip has changed a bit over the half-dozen or so shows I listened to, and the most recent one comes across like a monkey on acid - particularly the opening speeded-up MGM theme seems out of whack. In some cases the interludes between groups of tracks are a little difficult to understand, and in fact in a lot of the pre-produced "cart" tracks the speaking vocalist is too soft. Aside from that, Green Dragon maintains a good balance between music and speech throughout the show, and the balance of talk to music to promos is pretty good.
One relatively severe drawback I took note of is, I suspect, related to bandwidth issues. GD has had some bandwidth difficulties (to be expected when you're streaming and podcasting a show of this length), and he has chosen to encode his podcast MP3s at a relatively low bit-rate - they show up on my system as around 64bps, and some are as low as 31. I suspect this was an attempt to fit 2 hours of music in a small enough file to not choke podcatchers out there and to save himself a bit of money to boot. The problem is that in some cases the music definitely suffers from that underencoding.
Green Dragon does not give track lengths (rant), but that's probably a tall order for a show of this nature. File- and track-naming also leave something to be desired (rant), changing from show to show and without any date information anywhere, and sometimes named simply "ipod16.mp3". Something shorter, with some consistency of artist, album, and track name, preferably including a date ID in the ID3 tags would be helpful, with corresponding changes to the file-name itself. The show is generally work-safe, less so for children, and not guaranteed to be either.
All in all a strong podcast that makes it into my regular work-day soundtrack based on the strength and variety of music.
Subscribe to mp3s.
Tagged: podcast podcasting review
Posted by cori at January 18, 2005 12:40 AM