Category: audio

RiffTrax

I just discovered RiffTrax this weekend. This is basically a project where Mike Nelson, of MST3K fame, riffs on a movie (in MST3K style) and then releases the audio track as an MP3, which you can then play as you watch the movie on DVD. (He includes a few devices to help you keep the two in sync.) While this is obviously a bit of a kludge, it gets around the issues that MST3K had with licensing movies, and allows him to do movies that he’d never be able to get the rights to do, like The Matrix, X-Men, and Star Wars: Phantom Menace, all of which I downloaded and watched/listened to this weekend. (I’ll readily admit that I already own the DVDs for those three movies.) There was some pretty funny stuff on all three of them. Lots of Jar-Jar jokes for Star Wars, of course, and the usual assortment of oddball pop culture references and general silliness that you’d find in an episode of MST3K.

After discovering Rifftrax, I did a little searching, and found that there are quite a few other sites out there offering alternate commentaries for movies, some funny and some serious. There’s Commentary Central, offering an index of popular commentaries, and DVD PodBlast, offering a number of freely-downloadable commentaries on generally bad movies. And there’s the strange Wizard People, Dear Reader, which is an oddball alternate audio track for the first Harry Potter movie.

To help make the whole process of listening to these things a little easier, there’s a program called Sharecrow, that basically just plays a DVD movie (from your computer’s DVD drive) and an MP3 file at the same time, keeping them in sync, and letting you pause them simultaneously. Of course, this doesn’t work if you want to watch the movie on your TV. The method I used with Rifftrax was to play the DVD on my normal DVD player, while playing the MP3 on my laptop, which I just plopped down on the couch so I could easily hear it and control it.

I’m not sure if I’ll bother downloading any more of these right now, but I’ll definitely keep an eye on the Rifftrax site and see if they do any other movies that I’m really interested in.

podcatchers

I’ve been using Juice to download and manage podcasts on my Mac for quite some time now. When Apple added podcast support to iTunes, I though about just using that, but there are a few things I don’t like about the way iTunes does stuff. Also, iTunes doesn’t have BitTorrent support, and a couple of the podcasts I subscribe to use BT. Juice is pretty good, but it’s a bit slow on my machine, and there are a few quirks. I’d like to try out Transistr, but it’s been in “coming soon” mode since January, I think. This recent blog post indicates that they’re making progress on it, though. I don’t know if there are any other good podcatchers for the Mac.

Karl Pilkington

I finished listening to the first season of the Ricky Gervais Show today, on my way home from work. Here’s a recent article about Karl Pilkington, “the odd-thinking fall guy” of the show, as the article puts it. I did enjoy the show, though it falls into a bit of a predictable pattern after a while. Still, I think I’ll pop for the second and third seasons from iTunes.

The Tom Corven Project

I’m curious about this, though I don’t think I really have the time to start listening to it, considering all the other stuff I’ve got waiting to read and/or listen to right now.

Also, the Paul Story who writes this is not the Paul Storrie who writes comics.

podcasting stuff

I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts lately on a fairly regular basis, and I decided to take the next step today, and actually start listening to them on my iPod. I’d been simply pressing them to audio CDs and listening to them in my car via the CD changer. This works fine, but I usually don’t want to listen to a given podcast more than once or twice, so it’s kind of a waste of a CD.

I decided to use my old first-gen 5GB iPod for this, rather than clutter up my newer iPod with podcasts. Getting this set up turned out to be quite a production. The old iPod was Mac-formatted, so, at first, I set it up to sync with my “received podcasts” directory via XPlay. That worked OK, but I thought I could do better by switching to iTunes. So I reformatted the iPod and set it up to sync with iTunes. I didn’t get very far. I started getting disk errors, so I reformatted again and set everything up again. I did a little better this time. I got one disk error at one point, but it’s been good since. I’ve been playing around a bit, trying to stress it and see if it’s going to keep working or not. So far, so good.

I also decided to upgrade to iTunes 4.8, just for yuks. That worked fine, except that it broke iPodder. I upgraded to iPodder 2.0.3, and everything seems fine now.

So, after all that work, I now have an iPod full of podcasts that I can plug into my car stereo via an old casette adapter. It sounds OK, but not great. I also ordered a car charger from XtremeMac, so I can keep the thing going, since the battery life ain’t what it used to be.