The Unoffical Songcrafters New Songs Podcast

[Ted]

I developed a podcast URL for the Songcrafters New Songs Playlist.

Why? Because I listen to podcasts on my phone almost every day, but don't always make time to listen to Songcrafters. I was thinking, "If only my podcast app could get the latest songs, I wouldn't have to remember to go to the Songcrafters website every day. The songs would find me where I'm already putting my attention – when I'm not on the cursed computer."

If you already know what to do, here is the URL:

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https://web.tedjohnson.us/feeds/latestSCsongs.php
This is NOT technically supported by the Songcrafters Admin team. If you can't get it to work for you, leave them the hell alone. You can ask me. Got that?

You won't find this in public directories of Podcasts (e.g. Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, etc.). In fact, I've gone out of my way to make sure these services won't list the podcasts or the songs. If you want to submit your music to services that will play an advertisement before, during, or after your song, go nuts. That's for you to decide.

To subscribe to the podcast, you will need to copy that URL, and paste it on your podcast app under a feature called "Subscribe by RSS," or "Subscribe by URL," or "Private Podcast," or something like that. Here are some instructions for several podcast apps.

Here is what it looks like in my favorite podcast app, with songs sandwiched between my news podcasts:

"But what about the discussion, the community, the feedback!!!"

In the podcast episode description, there is a link that will take you right to the topic here on Songcrafters.org.

It's Just the Playlist Feed but more Podcast-y

You know that you can play the Latest Song in your music app, right? My script simply converts the jukebox playlist into the feed format for podcast apps (RSS).

Jukebox Playlist? What am I talking about? Have you ever seen or used this Playlist URL in one of the jukeboxes?

That URL will allow you to load the Latest Songs into your music app. Here's what it looks like in VLC Player on my phone:

If that's good enough for you, then use the Playist links and not my script. But I prefer the podcast method because it gives me a link to the post on the forum. And it only delivers new songs I haven't listened to yet.

There are other ways to get Songcrafters in a feed.

That is true.

This, for example, is the RSS feed for the Latest Songs board, using the query parameters supported by Simple Machines Forum:

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https://songcrafters.org/forum/index.php?action=.xml;type=atom;boards=91,92;limit=30;type=rss2
(HT to 64Guitars for showing me how that works.)

That will work fine in a news reader. It even includes the latest comments on posts. But it doesn't work in a podcast app.

This might be something that only I want, but I'm posting it here in case someone else might find it useful. And one more time: This is NOT technically supported by the Songcrafters Admin team. If you can't get it to work for you, leave them the hell alone. You can ask me.

[Zoltan]

Ted, this is cool! You're like this mad scientist who is always building, or thinking about new things

I was also happy to notice that you gave the explanation on how it was done. I mean there's this nerdy part of my brain that immediately started thinking about how did you achieve this.

The topic itself made me think of Songcrafters Podcast as a platform for some of you having discussions about the new songs and stuff. That would have been both a threat and an opportunity

And hey... It was also great to hear that i got the honours of being the first one played on your song stream!

[Ted]

The topic itself made me think of Songcrafters Podcast as a platform for some of you having discussions about the new songs and stuff.

That would be interesting. Someone started working on that idea once before, and it may get picked up again.

[StephenM]

very cool Ted... you rock and got a bit of geek in you... that is not a bad thing... I learned a lot...thanks... and yes.. I plan to use some of this.

[Ted]

I've gone out of my way to make sure these services won't list the podcasts or the songs.

In case you are wondering what I did to discourage having the songs listed in public podcast directories, I did three geeky things:

Every song has this tag telling Apple to go away:

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<itunes:block>yes</itunes:block>
I tell all the good robots to not look inside my "feeds" folder:

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User-agent: *
Disallow: /feeds/
And for good measure, I tell my web server not to serve feeds to anything identifies itself as a robot. (Unfortunately, bad robots show fake IDs to web servers.)

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# Request that robots do not index the RSS feeds on this subdomain.
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
    # Set X-Robots-Tag header for all feeds
    # Even PHP files within the /feeds/ folder
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/feeds/ [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.(rss|atom|xml)$
    RewriteRule ^ - [E=NOINDEX:true]
</IfModule>
That last one might impact your podcast app's ability to access the feed. Probably not, but if you are trying this out and experiencing problems, let me know.

[Ted]

There hasn't been a lot of uptake on this, which is fine. I mostly did this for myself.

I created a couple more podcast feeds from the playlists:

Overlooked Gems

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https://web.tedjohnson.us/feeds/overlookedSCsongs.php

On This Day

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https://web.tedjohnson.us/feeds/onThisDaySCsongs.php
The "On This Day" playlist fills up your podcast app really fast, so I don't really recommend exploring that jukebox in this way. (Though I definitely recommend exploring that jukebox, if you, like me have missed out on a lot of good music here over the years.)

I've ended up not using these podcast feeds quite the way I thought I would. Occasionally after a news podcast, I'll be surprised by a song that's been automatically added to the playlist. But instead I end up listening on my computer – exactly where I say I don't like to listen to music. I use an RSS reader service (https://www.feedspot.com/). I already use Feedspot as a news aggregator. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who isn't already an RSS junkie. The advantage this has over simply going to the "Latest Songs" jukebox, is that it works like a "checklist;" it keeps track of what I have listened to ("read") and what I haven't.

[Jean Pierre]

vous allez rire Ted..je ne sais pas ce qu'est un pod cast