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Well, I made it to episode 30 of Sellout Central. That’s 30 weeks, 210 days. And I think I’m going to take a little break.

It’s been fun but a surprising amount of work to do — the podcast script I wrote made assembling the episodes easy, but the real work of course was in tracking down new music. Which is great on one hand as it forced me to go out and find stuff I liked, but on the other hand it’s exhausting. I got shit to do.

It was also an experiment to see what would happen if I kept at a regular podcast week after week so it was reliable. 30 weeks later, it’s clear: the audience peaked early on and has slowly declined, so I’m not feeling it’s the best use of my time. But I’ll let the episodes sit around for a while and maybe I’ll get back to it after a while.

I tried doing a podcast a few years ago and failed. I just wanted to share some music I was into but compiling the podcasts was time-consuming enough that it got pushed aside almost immediately.

So I’ve started another podcast on Sellout Central which I’m planning to put out every Monday.

This time though I’ve spent some of my vacation time figuring out how to automate most of the process.

The nerdy details:

Using sox, flite, lame and a bash script, all I have to do is export a playlist from Foobar2000 and run a script. Sox crossfades the songs and compiles them into one big WAV file, flite generates the speech synthesis for the intros and outros and then lame compresses them into an MP3 with appropriate ID3 tags. So basically, I export the WAVs and then run:

./podcastit.sh [episode #] [# of songs]

And get back a shiny podcastable MP3. Whether anyone will like the songs I like is a whole different matter.

If you want the script, let me know and I can package it up.

Update: and here is the script all packaged up.