What I'm yelling about:: The New, New Podcast Review Rant Page
Podcasters! Put music track lengths in your podcasts!
Podcasters! Put your podcast's name in your mp3 file names!
There are 2 reasons why I think track lengths should be in every podcast that plays music:
1) One of the great things about podcasting is its time-shifted nature. The podcatchers can listen to all content whenever they want to do so; it's completely in their control. However, one thing that's missing is the ability to control playback - typically once you're listening, you're listening. Sure, you can fast-forward, but on most of the portable devices that I know of, that's a crap-shoot at best - you can't hear what's going by when you fast-forward, so you pick what seems like a reasonable length of time to wait and try again. By giving the track length in the podcast, the podcaster gives a little extra ability to the podcatcher to control the time-shift of the playback, and more control is good.
2) One of the bad things about podcasting as a whole is the inability to scan the content the way you can scan a text blog, for example. Now this may seem like the same argument as the one above, but I think that it's different enough to be treated differently. Again, if I'm listening on my laptop I have a lot of control - I can listen at an accelerated rate or skip around and easily get bakc to where I want to be. On a portable device, however, it's substantially more difficult. Again, giving the track lengths to the podcatcher gives them that little bit of extra ability to scan for the content they want. I think Adam Curry talked about this best in the Podcasting session at BloggerCon III; you can listen to his comments [clip]. Not to say that Adam is The God of Podcasting (although many think of him thusly), but he is influential, and I think he's got the right idea on this subject. [Thanks to Doug Kaye and ITConversations for the audio, Adam Curry for leading the session, and Dave Winer for arranging BloggerConIII.]
Those of us using a filesystem for podcast file management can't easily see mp3 meta-data in the file system. Rather, we can see it, but not all of it, and none of it is there by default. Those of us who are getting podcasts by subscribing to aggregated feeds get all of the 'casts from iPodder in one big directory, and it's hard to tell what's what when they're named things like "Podcast1.mp3". What makes it worse is that I see the aggregated feeds becoming more and more the way to go, as people subscribe to dynamically generated rss feeds tailored to suit their own channel preferences ("All music podcasts", "all sports podcasts", "all news podcasts", &ct.)
In addition to appropriate file names, I'd also like to request consistenly decent meta-data in the files as well. Having a descriptive filename helps a ton when you're looking at files in the filesystem, but having a great filename with a terrible track name in the mp3 meta-data isn't terribly helpful when looking at the track in the portable player. I have some ideas of what a satisfactory meta-data layout would be, but I'd love to hear other's ideas; please contact me with your ideas.