Feed album titles

[RichieRich]

I recently signed up for the feed after paying the basic subscription thinking that it would save me a lot of hassle when it comes to downloading. The only problem is that the album title's are all the same for the different lesson levels when you download via the feed. If you download manually this is not the case and you get a list of albums on your IPod which relate to the various levels. I'm finding that I'm going to have to rename all files to change the album title after downloading the feed. It's really really annoying!

[Ulver_684]

I recently signed up for the feed after paying the basic subscription thinking that it would save me a lot of hassle when it comes to downloading. The only problem is that the album title's are all the same for the different lesson levels when you download via the feed. If you download manually this is not the case and you get a list of albums on your IPod which relate to the various levels. I'm finding that I'm going to have to rename all files to change the album title after downloading the feed. It's really really annoying!

Richie-san!

Yes your right, you have all my support!

[markystar]

This has come up once or twice before. And it's something I too would like to see also.

Actually, we do tag the album titles with the corresponding lesson type.
However, I believe the problem is the way iTunes and iPod handle podcasts and the way they handle music (Podcast Directory, Music Library). Jason can probably explain this much better than I can.

I haven't tried this myself, but I suspect that if you move the lesson files from the Podcast Directory into a Playlist or even just into the Music Library, iTunes will automatically create album folders if "Keep iTunes Music Library Organized" is checked. But again, I haven't tried this personally.

That said, I spoke with Eran about this today and he informed me that in 2008 we'll be making some changes to how the feed works. This will creatively address this issue specifically

I guess all I can say at this point is it will be dealt in a really cool way. And I apologize for any inconvenience in the meantime.

[RichieRich]

Hi there. Thinking about it, the ideal situation would be to have separate feeds for each of the levels. Currently, if I do a 'get all' on the feed in ITunes it obviously downloads all lessons, blogs etc. The problem is that I'm only really interested in the lower intermediate and intermediate levels and when I sync my IPod to the podcast it insists on downloading all files to the IPod.

I'd suggest having separate feeds for all of the levels. Also, I've paid for the basic feed, which includes the PDFs. This actually makes matters worse as I end up with all the PDFs in the same podcast folder. A separate feed for PDFs would also be really good.

So, that's my suggestion, separate feeds and with tracks within each feed having different album titles.

The site is great though. I've been learning Japanese for a long time and the audio files are amoung the best learning resources I've ever found.

[markystar]

actually what you suggested (separate feeds) is what's being planned. so it's good to know we're all on the same page!

marky

[RichieRich]

Great, that's going to make life a lot easier for me and loads of other people I guess. Ensuring that the feeds also have different album titles would be great in order to ensure that tracks are organised nicely on IPods etc. Anyway, I'll look forward to it. Cheers.

[Jason]

The temporary workaround for this is to create smart playlists for different lesson types. Each lesson item contains the lesson type in the title, so you can create smart playlists for items that contain the lesson type you want in the song title. Get all will still download everything, but at least this way you have a convenient place for each lesson type you want to see.

[edit] This is how I do it: