This episode covers how I keep track of what I'm listening to

I almost never produced this podcast as I discovered part way through that I had covered it in my show "Describing how I listen to podcasts PART 2" (HPR 2889). I'm conscious I have a tendency to repeat myself in real life, I think this is because I have such a terrible memory. Despite this I decided to continue with the episode but will go into subject in a bit more detail.

These ideas slowly evolved over time and I think some of them may now be redundant. I think I need to do some tidying.

As I've previously mention I used cordless headphones to listen to my podcasts and audiobooks. The headphones come with base transmitter which was originally plugged into my old Compaq home server. This server was generally turned on when I came home from work and turned off before going to bed. Each night I had to remember which track I was on and where about in the track. I often forgot and had to try and find the place again. This quickly became a tiresome task.

My first solution was to use some bash Kung Fu jiggery pokery to create list of files which I placed in each podcast folder. In the process I learned a bit about using bash commands.

Command used to create index

id3v2 -l *.mp3 | grep 'TIT2' | cut -c44- >> readme.txt

id3v2 -l *.mp3 | grep 'TIT2' | cut -c44- | egrep 'HPR[01][9][7-9]' >> readme.txt

id3v2 -l *.mp3 | grep 'TIT2' | cut -c44- | egrep 'HPR[1-9]' |less >> readme.txt

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Example output

epr0006.mp3 - dosman complete

hpr0010.mp3 - linux boot process, part 1 complete

hpr0012.mp3 - zen virtulization complete

hpr0018.mp3 - book review complete

The downside of this was that at the end of each night I had to remember to update my file lists recording what I had listened to and what position I was in within the track. From time to time I had to update this list by appending the latest episodes sitting on my server using the previous id3v2 command.

As you can imagine this took up a fair amount of time and became very tiresome, I would sometimes forget to do it this would cause me a headache next time I started listening to my podcasts.

My next solution involved creating a bash script that attempted to persuade my music player moc to find the track I was previously listening to.

The script sometimes worked but it was a bit flaky and didn't always work.

My final solution is in multiple parts

The 1st part consists of a bash script and a log file, it's a handy way of checking the last podcast episode and last position, this information is recorded to the log file when the front end of moc is exited by hitting Q. Of course this doesn't work if mocp closes for any other reason ie if I forgot to hit Q or my Pi crashed.

First script

~/scripts/podcasts

quick lash up of script created 29/12/12 (DD/MM/YY)

Created to keep track of last position of listened podcast

Script displays last 4 lines of logfile "podcasts.txt"

The four lines consist of a Dashed line separator, the last recorded Track

Title, last recorded Filename and the last recorded track position.

The script then pauses and displays a message saying

press any key to continue.

Runs mocp

When the frontend of mocp exits

The script gets the current track filename

If the result is empty ie no filename then

exit with error saying (moc was not playing anything)

if not empty

append a dashed line separator, the current track title, the current

filename, the current track position to logfile it then display last 4 lines

of logfile and exits the script

So in essence I get