Cloud Player

As the Queen is completely sick of hearing, my project at present is the Amazon Cloud Player and uploading everything I've ever owned up to it. At present, I'm pushing just shy of 22,000 tracks, and I'm sort of leveling out as I rip the final CDs in my collection. It's the clean up that's cumbersome. Anyway...

I'm presently trying to get some of the Podcasts I want to keep hold of on there. Thing is, Amazon states that they do not support a number of different audio types at present, including Podcasts and Audiobooks. However, I wonder what it is they don't support or how they even know it's a Podcast. When I did my massive iPod uploads, I managed to upload both Podcasts and Audiobooks without the system so much as whining. However, when attempting to deliberately upload some of the other ones, now it seems Amazon is onto me, and it ignores the files. Odd, I thought. What is different about these files versus the others?

Hence, I tried experimenting with all kinds of variations on the files. I've tweaked the metadata all over the place changing the file type from Podcast to Music, changing the genre, changing the artists. Well, it was too wise to fall for any of that. I ran the files through converters to change the entire file type from mp3 to other bit rates of mp3 and aac, but it was still wise to me.

So I thought back to the iPod and its uploads. What is different about the iPod files? Well, when you copy a file to an iPod, it pops it in a hidden directory in a completely random location and renames it from "Bob's Secret Podcast for Geeks Who Like To Watch White Out Dry on a Monitor - Programme 47.mp3" to "ACYX.mp3". I thought that was novel, so I renamed all my Podcasts to four letter file names.

It totally worked. Almost.

I had 16 remaining Podcasts that for whatever reason would not upload (actually there were three others, but in my various upload attempts, I managed to grab one at a time...yeah, I don't know). So I decided to run them through the MP3 converter and rename them (for a third time). It finally worked for those last few.

Never tell a geek he can't upload a file he wants to upload. He will find a way.