#huffduffer

Update of this post, as Stitcher has released a new website.

I made a little bookmarklet that scrapes a podcast episode page for the audio mp3 url and then sends it Huffduffer:

I’ll start off with the fact that I’m a big fan of The Gillmore Gang and recommend it to anyone who is interested in the very bleeding edge of the overlap of technology and media. I’ve been listening almost since the beginning, and feel that digging back into their archives is a fantastic learning experience even for the well-informed. Most older episodes stand up well to the test of time.

The Problem

In the Doc Soup episode of The Gillmor Gang on 5/13/17–right at the very end–Steve Gillmor reiterated, “This isn’t a podcast. This was a podcast. It will always be a podcast, but streaming is where it’s at, and that’s what we’re doing right now.” As such, apparently Tech Crunch (or Steve for that matter) doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to have any sort of subscribe-able feed for those who prefer to listen to a time shifted version of the show. (Ironically in nearly every other episode they talk about the brilliance of the Apple TV, which is–guess what?–a highly dedicated time shifting viewing/listening device.) I suppose that their use of an old, but modified TV test pattern hiding in the og:image metadata on their webpages is all-too-apropos.

It’s been several years (around the time of the Leo Incident?) since The Gillmor Gang has reliably published an audio version, a fact I find painful and frustrating as I’m sure many others do as well. At least once or twice a year, I spend an hour or so searching around to find one, generally to no avail. While watching it live and participating in the live chat may be nice, I typically can’t manage the time slot, so I’m stuck trying to find time to watch the video versions on Tech Crunch. Sadly, looking at four or more old, wrinkly, white men (Steve himself has cautioned, “cover your eyes, it’ll be okay…” without admitting it could certainly use some diversity) for an hour or more isn’t my bailiwick. Having video as the primary modality for this show is rarely useful. To me, it’s the ideas within the discussion which are worthwhile, so I only need a much lower bandwidth .mp3 audio file to be able to listen. And so sadly, the one thing this over-technologized show (thanks again TriCaster!) actually needs from a production perspective is a simple .mp3 (RSS, Atom, JSON feed, or h-feed) podcast feed!

Solutions

In recent batches of searching, I have come across a few useful resources for those who want simple, sweet audio out of the show, so I’m going to document them here.

First, some benevolent soul has been archiving audio copies of the show to The Internet Archive for a while. They can be found here (sorted by upload date): https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Gillmor+Gang%22&sort=-publicdate

In addition to this, one might also use other search methods, but this should give one most of the needed weekly content. Sadly IA doesn’t provide a useful feed out…

To create a feed quickly, one can create a free Huffduffer account. (This is one of my favorite tools in the world by the way.) They’ve got a useful bookmarklet tool that allows you to visit pages and save audio files and metadata about them to your account. Further, they provide multiple immediate means of subscribing to your saves as feeds! Thus you can pick and choose which Gillmor Gang episodes (or any other audio files on the web for that matter) you’d like to put into your feed. Then subscribe in your favorite podcatcher and go.

For those who’d like to skip a step, Huffduffer also provides iTunes and a variety of other podcatcher specific feeds for content aggregated in other people’s accounts or even via tags on the service. (You can subscribe to what your friends are listening to!) Thus you can search for Gillmor Gang and BOOM! There are quick and easy links right there in the sidebar for you to subscribe to your heart’s content! (Caveat: you might have to filter out a few duplicates or some unrelated content, but this is the small price you’ll pay for huge convenience.)

My last potential suggestion might be useful to some, but is (currently) so time-delayed it’s likely not as useful. For a while, I’ve been making “Listen” posts to my website of things I listen to around the web. I’ve discovered that the way I do it, which involves transcluding the original audio files so the original host sees and gets the traffic, provides a subscribe-able faux-cast of content. You can use this RSS feed to capture the episodes I’ve been listening to lately. Note that I’m way behind right now and don’t always listen to episodes in chronological order, so it’s not as reliable a method for the more avid fan. Of course now that I’ve got some reasonable solutions… I’ll likely catch up quickly and we’re off to the races again.

Naturally none of this chicanery would be necessary if the group of producers and editors of the show would take five minutes to create and host their own version. Apparently they have the freedom and flexibility to not have to worry about clicks and advertising (which I completely appreciate, by the way) to need to capture the other half of the audience they’re surely missing by not offering an easy-to-find audio feed. But I’m dead certain they’ve got the time, ability, and resources to easily do this, which makes it painful to see that they don’t. Perhaps one day they will, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it.

Podcasts are on the rise. Nobody has time to read, so audio content steps in to fill the place between your ears with content.

I stumbled upon a few services lately, that allow me to curate my own feed of found audio content on the web.

Huffduffer

You come across a audiofile on the web and you want to consume it in your favorite podcast app? Or an interview on youtube where the video part can be neglected? Or a single episode you want to listen to? Maybe you ripped your old audiobook cds and uploaded them in one large mp3 into your public dropbox folder?

Go to Huffduffer, setup an account for free and start to curate your own podcast feed in adding youtube videos (audio gets magically extracted), single mp3 files (from dropbox or any webpage).

Since the feeds by all Huffduffer users are public you can discover a lot of new podcasts and when you tag your content nicely it helps others to discover new stuff.

Huffduffer is built and maintained by one guy and works smoothly since years.

Check out my huffduffer profile 

Narro

A slightly different approach has Narro. This service gives you the ability to listen to articles from websites... in your favorite podcast app.

It’s basically a Text2Speech service that converts articles to mp3 that get added to a podcast feed that you can subscribe to.

My Pocket (the read-it-later service) account counts over 700 articles that I probably never going to read. Finding Narro, I started to add some of them to this service and listen to them. Although Pocket and other read it later services offer a text2speech engine, Narro is the better way, since you stay in your podcast app with all the features you love (like smart speed in Overcast).

Narro offers you 15 article conversions per month for free. You are able to select from a wide range of english speaking engines. Some sound more natural than others.

Listening to a Text2Speech engine can be tiring, depending on how robotic the voice sounds. But having an artificially spoken article thrown in between real podcast content is ok. Here is an example.

Justcast

Before I discovered Huffduffer, I used the service Justcast, that builds a feed out of mp3 files, from a dropbox folder. Unfortunately the app stopped working for me, but it’s worth a try.

Since the free version of Justcast only delivers 3 episodes it’s nothing to use for serious podcasting. But if you want to listen to an audiobook, this service works well.

Overcast offers upload of own content to their service if you become a Patreon. For freeloaders, Justcast is a nice option. You shouldn’t spread copyrighted material as podcast (like commercial audiobooks). But if you keep it all to yourself, it’s a nice workaround.

by Zack Zarrillo

I listen to a lot of audio, and if you’re reading this, you probably do too. Huffduffer is a fantastic tool that I’ve been using via continual recommendations from Merlin Mann. What does Huffduffer do? From MacWorld in 2013:

Here’s how Huffduffer works: You sign up for an account and drag the Huffduff It bookmarklet into your browser’s toolbar. (There’s also a Safari extension.) When you visit a webpage containing an audio file you want to save, you click the Huffduff It button, add some optional metadata, and press the button. You can also just visit Huffduffer.com and add any file URL manually.

The tool does marvels for audio from YouTube videos. It’s graduation time, which means there are a ton of commencement speeches turning up left and right. Want to hear one of those in your podcast player? Huffduffer takes that audio and puts it in your own RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your podcast player.

Huffduffer: custom podcast feeds

Build a custom podcast feed with Huffduffer

Huffduffer is a neat service for podcast geeks. Sign up and install the bookmarklet to add any compatible audio file to your feed. It’s perfect for people who want to piece together a feed of specific episodes without subscribing to every podcast they find.

For example, my own Huffduffer feed contains a recent episode of All Tech Consideredby NPR,…

Create your own podcast.

Find links to audio files on the Web.

Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast.

Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds.

I was using the “upload to Dropbox and star the file on my iPhone within the Dropbox app so that it gets saved onto the phone” method. Pretty clunky.

I’d heard of huffduffer.com, but had no idea what the appeal of huffing a duff was! Now I do. And it’s just what what my GP ordered for me.

It’s Instapaper for audio files that are online, aka, in the cloud.

You add the URL of any audio file to your huffduffer account, and a podcast feed is created, containing those audio files. Voila! Subscribe to said podcast feed in whatever podcast app you wish.

This can be useful if you want to listen to a one off episode of a podcast you don’t subscribe to; just huffduff it and it’s in your personal podcast feed.