One of my favorite new features of the new site is the personal feed. Subscribing to your own custom feed of Chinese lessons is a simple 4 step process.
Step #1 - Select which levels of future lessons you would like to receive. These subscriptions are designed to replace the various level feeds in v2. You can also have your scheduled lessons included as well.
Step #2 - Select one of three file types. The episodes in the public feed are currently encoded at 64 kbps. Basic, Premium and Practice subscribers can get access to higher quality audio (128kbps version) or lower quality, smaller file size audio if they prefer.
Step #3 - Brand new to version 3 is the option to have an additional file also included in your RSS feed. These options include: (a) simplified PDF, (b) traditional PDF, and (c) dialogue-only audio file. Add in whichever you prefer.
Step #4 - Copy the feed to a podcast aggregator, such as iTunes, where you can go to ‘Advanced - Subscribe to Podcast’ and paste your own personal link.
Or if you prefer, subscribe in Google Reader:
We hope this increases the convenience of consuming the daily lessons.
Hank.
Looks great on paper, Hank. And it’s a truly brilliant and innovative idea in theory.
The problem is that there are no NO UNIQUE ID3 TAGS. That means there’s no way to SORT them in iTunes. Whatever I download into iTunes gets tossed into one big undifferentiated folder. I might have a Saturday Show, an Intermediate lesson, a Newbie lesson … who knows?
If you tossed us a few well-chosen ID3 tags (put’em in “grouping” or “comment”, then we could use the iTunes “Smart Playlist” option to filter the material into discrete folders.
Has this really not occurred to anyone?
Fu Da-Wei,
Your comment is confusing. Of course there are unique ID3 tags. Each MP3 has a unique title in the format “Level - Title” as well as a unique track number.
iTunes puts the RSS items into one folder according to your username. iTunes also renames the files according to track, level, title, etc. We can’t control how iTunes renames them.
So is your complaint that on V3 all the files go into a folder determined by your username, whereas on V2 you subscribed to each level separately in iTunes and thus got separate folders for each?
Also, the Staurday Show is on a separate feed, so it will never get mixed in with the lesson content.
-John
Okay …
My most current download from my personal feed yields:
NAME: A Business Dinner with a Supplier
ARTIST: ChinesePod.com
YEAR: 2007
TRACK: 488
ALBUM: ChinesePod - FuDaWei
GENRE: Podcast
COMMENT: Learn Mandarin Chinese on Your Terms with free daily podcasts, website review, a vibrant community and guidance from experts. Visit us at http://www.chinesepod.com
The rest are similar. I see nothing to sort on. I don’t see any indication of a level.
Now, I do see that the NEXT podcast in the pipe is called “Advanced - 自然灾害” That DOES provide a keyword to sort on. Is that an adjustment you guys just made for future podcasts? If so, then you’re right. I have what I need and withdraw my concern.
Hank calls this one of his favorite features. If done right, it promises to be my absolute hands-down favorite. A great idea that would not have occurred to me.
Fu Da-wei,
We actually went to a lot of trouble to make sure that every single MP3 is tagged properly for V3. So we are quite sure that the ID3 tag for every MP3 on V3 uses the “Level - Title” naming convention for MP3s. If it’s not turning out that way, it’s because of (1) iTunes altering information, or (2) incorrect information in the RSS feed. We will look into both possibilities.
I agreee with Fu Da-wei that this seems like a great feature but I do have one question, why radio buttons and not check boxes for the extra material? What if someone would like to get both PDFs and dialog-only MP3s?
I have the same remark as David. Great feature but I would like to include the PDF and the dialogue only mp3.
Also I have tried this on Google reader and it looks great. I am sure that if users would use this personalized feed (in any reader btw) it would address a lot of the complaints voiced here and on the forum.
There is no need IMO for a page -like on V2- with all the podcasts in sequential order on the website because you can easily make your own. I have done this just now with Newbie, Elementary and Intermediate levels . And it is all there at the click of a mouse with integrated players and everything. So for a first reconaissance of what has been going on the last couple of days, this is actually a great help. Let’s spread the word
What with the files that I cannot include into my personal feed??
Yes, I am again talking of the pure-dialogue-mp3s.
They could be such a marvellous new V3-feature but currently seem to be treated as unbeloved orphans…
They have identical titles as the full-lesson-mp3s, but it should be indicated that they are DIALOGUES only. In a place which is easily viewable on an iPod, so latest after the level. What I currently manually edit: put DIA in between level and hyphon for content-title.
Then they should be identically ID3-tagged as the full-lesson-mp3s, i.e. including Hanzi Pinyin English. BTW I have never found Pinyin: is it really supposed to be there or was this a premature hopeful announcement of John? This copying of full-lesson-podcast-description into pure-dialogue lyrics (as nothing else is available, because this mp3 currently is no “podcast” in iTunes) is the next manual step for me, and a pretty superfluous one that adds no value to my learning process.
We should be able to customize which mp3-files we want to include into our personal feeds. For some that could be pure-dialogue for lower levels and both for current level, either for having easy review means or for repeated-background-listening to gain repetition for memorizing. In lower levels you just check if you comprehend everything or if more in-depth learning might be advisable.
Whereas the inclusion of the PDFs into my iTunes-feed is useless for me: as the copy-issue has never been properly solved I do not need the PDF at all, I just go to the workaround-HTML-website from where I can copy. Because what I really need is a file into which I can type, so if the included document would be a word doc that would be useful (but then I understand that you do not want to promote one special word processing software).
I need to put a word-by-word translation underneath the pinyin in order to render the different sentence structure of Chinese transparent to me and derive sentence patterns to reapply for own phrases – Birkenbihl approach. This step I do not complain about, it is not superfluous but part of my learning. (It could be done centrally for all, but I am clear that the Birkenbihl approach has only some 80% overlap with CPod’s approach.) The prerequisite is just having copyable content delivered.
The pure-dialogue-mp3s are a nice beginning, but without these obvious issues solved I do not yet sing the song of the songs about your achievements here - afterwards I will!
Would we be able to get both the dialogue audio and PDF in the future?
What is the difference between scheduled episodes and future episodes?
Thanks
I’m not sure how to describe what I’m seeing but here goes.
Prior to the change I relied on the sequential numbering of the lessons because it was a very simple way to keep track of the lessons. I noticed the change at the beginning of April where the lessons were labeled by level - newbie, elementary, etc. with the lesson content title following the level title. This was an improvement because otherwise you just had to know newbie was at 160 episodes, and Elementary was at whatever number, etc.
I became a paying memeber of the community this week and now my personalized feed - to which I get everything even though I’m not ready for most of it - only lists the content title of the podcast.
For example in Itunes my old feed looks like this
Elementary - The Clogged Toilet 10:56 4/15/2007
but the new “improved” personalized feed looks like this
The Clogged Toilet 10:56 4/15/2007
Here’s what the lesson from the 16th looks like on the old feed
Intermediate - A Business Dinner with a Supplier 11:27 4/16/2007
and like this on the new feed.
A Business Dinner with a Supplier 11:27 4/16/2007
Not sure why this is happening but the new feed isn’t an improvement from an end-user point of view.
What I’d really like is separate feeds for each level. So instead of a custom feed of ChinesePod - Rhody Red
Would it be possible to do have a ChinesePod - Newbie, ChinesePod - Elementary, etc. That way all the lessons are organized by difficulty and chronological by default.
This feature seems like it has some great potential!
Thanks for all the hard work you guys are doing. Like many people who have posted I enjoyed several aspects of V2 and had my own little routine with the site. However, I trust you guys and believe that you are making these changes and going through the headache of listening to us all complain because V3 will be a better product/tool. Keep up the hard work!
Fu Da-Wei, John and others:
I’ve had similar issues with keeping things organized via the ID3 and have discovered that ITunes totally changes the metadata it uses in a different way than it was really embedded in the original mp3 when it is downloading via a podcast subscription. If you right-click on any podcast track under your personal feed and select ‘Get Info’ and then go to the ‘Lyrics’ tab, what do you see. It should be hanzi followed by pinyin followed by English for each line of the dialog. Also, you can view the ID3 tag info on an mp3 in Windows by right-clicking on an mp3 file, selecting ‘Properties’, then the ‘Summary Tab’ and then the ‘Advanced’ button toward the lower right (unless you selected ‘Advanced’ previously when viewing this type of file in which case you will already be in ‘Advanced’ mode) and then left-clicking once next to the ‘Lyrics’ field to view the entire ‘Lyrics’ tag as truly embedded in the mp3 file. Some workarounds I’ve tried are to:
1) Import your downloaded files manually into ITunes to strip them of their ‘Podcastiness’ so that ITunes doesn’t mangle your tags. This unfortanutely would require busywork daily which means it’s a pretty poor solution on an ongoing basis.
2) Make a Smart PlayList in ITunes which looks for an ‘Album’ tag = to . This worked but somehow the ID3 tags were still mangles.
3) Use another Podcatcher (such as Juice, which is FREE and multi-platform) which will automatically make Playlists in ITunes based on Feed subscriptions. This leaves the metadata intact and requires no further work on my part on an ongoing basis other than the fact that I now have to open Juice to stay current with podcast downloads and then when I want to sync use ITunes. Additionally, Juice seems to do some of its own ‘helpful’ mangling of tags and the regular podcast and dialog-only mp3s seem to have the same name within the same playlist. I solved this problem by creating two new (this is a one-time deal) Smart Playlists in ITunes. One looks to the original playlist that Juice dumps into and looks for tracks with a ‘time’ tag of > 2 minutes. This is for the dialogs. The other is just the inverse.
This sounds very involved but it really isn’t. Once you get it up and running you have a (hopefully) long-term solution.
Hope this helps.
Re: radio buttons vs. check boxes
Originally, we did have check boxes. It seems iTunes displays PDF’s accompanying MP3’s as notes, rather than as separate entries (subscribe to a PDF, then to the Dialogue MP3 to see what I mean) so we went with radio buttons to limit supplementary files to one. In general, we favor functionality over presentation so if there is general consensus on moving to check boxes we can get it done next week (an 8 day work week - not sure what the Chinese government was thinking on that one). Please let us know which approach you prefer.
I don’t use iTunes and I don’t own an iPod, it is all basic website and mp3 player for me. I think a lot of people will use the feeds for RSS readers too and there it doesn’t really matter because the pdf file is only a link away.
I guess that an elegant solution would be to allow users to have more than 1 feed. It doesn’t have to be unlimited, say 2 or 3, one for Ipod and similar devices and another for RSS readers or other stuff or like someone suggested to allow one to construct several feeds according to level.
***UPDATE FOR BIG JOHN***
Okay, John …
The last 2 (out of 5) podcasts that I have downloaded through iTunes using the personal feed option have both reached me with the proper “Level - Title”, so I assume something got tweaked. Don’t know what happened to the first three (The Breakup, The Clogged Toilet, & A Business Dinner with a Supplier) that stripped them of the tag. Maybe I’ll download one of’em again.
As far as I’m concerned, all is right in the world again and I can sort again. Just don’t do any lessons like: “Newbie - Advanced Tones are Elementary”
Thanx muchly!
I have setup my RSS feed, put it into Snarfer, but there are no items. I did this yesterday. Does it take a while to catch up/synchronise etc? The main feed works, so it is not the program as far as I can tell.
Also I am not able yet to access the feed of all MP3s. Does this still exist?
motto … hate to ask a silly question, but did you bookmark the lessons you wanted and add them to your calendar in the “Study Schedule” section?
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Dear Fu Da-Wei, I took a while to figure out that “Scheduled Lessons” in the RSS setup page didn’t mean “scheduled for release by ChinesePod”, but rather, lessons that I had manually scheduled. That is, if I had a Premium Account. Which I didn’t.
[/BLUSH]
The idea of scheduling lessons is a key concept in V3, very innovative (and hence, possibly counter-intuitive), and the road signage could have been a bit better. So that users can figure it out without having to visit the Blogs to catch Ken’s very clear note on having to schedule lessons).
[QUOTE]
iTunes puts the RSS items into one folder according to your username. iTunes also renames the files according to track, level, title, etc. We can’t control how iTunes renames them.
[/QUOTE]
No, ChinesePod can’t control how iTunes renames files — yeah, sure, blame iTunes! –, but you’d think there’d be a more helpful technical response from a website that features a swanky new iPod Nano so prominently on its homepage.
Btw, I am still using the same Mac and the same iPod and the same version of iTunes that I did before V3, and never had these problems before. In fact, I am still happily downloading the RSS feed (including PDFs from JapanesePod101.com, without things being mixed up. It seems that Peter-san and his colleagues in Tokyo got the pdf feed directly to iTunes right, at least; it’s a relatively new feature for them.
I know that my increasingly grumpy posts are annoying, but my appreciation of the ChinesePod team for producing such amazing content has never changed. Thank you, Ken et al, and I mean it.
I messed around a bunch with the feed yesterday, it’s a cool feature, but I wasn’t quite able to get it working to my satisfaction.
Feedback:
- Allow a user to view each level in a different feed. One giant feed just doesn’t work for me. Other users have already mentioned this, and I agree - there really should be the ability to create multiple custom feeds, not just one. Looking for a workaround I tried all the podcast aggregators - ziepod can create virtual feeds based on filters, which would have satisfied this requirement, but unfortunately it corrupts chinese ID3 tags right now.
- Text based dialog - why isn’t there an option to download the text only html dialog? I would prefer this over pdf, and based on a lot of comments I’ve seen I’m not alone.
- Better still (than above) would be to have a premium subscriber’s feed include the text based dialog as part of the same RSS container as the original MP3 download. I think this would be a big win, as this would give everyone using a PDA (or reading the podcast caption offline) the ability to instantly get transcript audio as a single RSS feed, dialogue and audio in one entry. Right now those of us using PDA’s generally can’t view the lyrics id3 tag in the mp3, and people using Ipod’s are stuck with a poor font that’s difficult to read anyway.
- PDF file naming - it would be extremely helpful if pdf filenames were handled the same as MP3 titles - pdf’s use a machine name at the moment, making it very difficult to match them up with a given MP3 episode. They just wind up in a giant jumble of all levels.
- Album/level naming - this is more of a nit than the other items, but I really miss the hanzi in the non-advanced album/Level titles. We are here to learn Chinese after all. Note that I fully agree that having Album titles in the first place is a tremendous improvement. I have extremely fond memories of learning what 蔡鸟 meant from my Chinese friends (as they laughed and giggled), and I miss seeing them in version 3. It’s one of the ‘quirks’ of the old Chinesepod that was extremely endearing, and I don’t see how removing them enhances the user experience. I manually renamed every title using both Chinese and English - e.g. ‘蔡鸟 - Newbie’ Note I could rename these myself quite easily if each level had it’s own feed.
I have ticked “Dialogue-only audio” in step #3 of my personal feed.
But it does not work, neither on CPod nor on SpanishSense.
The pure-dialogue-mp3 is never included, whereas pdf are.
What is wrong?
What about the Pinyin in the podcast description? I still never see it, just Hanzi English. Is it really supposed to be there and therefore maybe an iTunes-triggered bug?
Still I agree with Auntie that you should solve the issues with iTunes - if you can’t, next to nobody of your customers will be able to, certainly not me.
What I strive to achieve on my iPod: have the full-lesson-mp3 followed by its pure-dialogue-mp3, separated by Level.
But this needs different titles for the files, which adds another step to the manual process of right-click-saving the pure-dialogue-mp3 to my disk, then importing it into iTunes.
I also subscribe to Lee’s suggestions, for each of his 5 bullet points.
Hi.
I hope we can still get the same podcast subscription wherein each folder is identified per level. That way, we can easily go back to lessons in our itunes/ipods on topics we want to review.
Unlike the version now, where everything is downloaded into 1 itunes folder.
Thanks.
@ Joanne
The feature you are missing is available thru basic subscription.
Hi, can you only get the traditional pdfs in your feed if you are a premium subscriber? I used to when I was a premium subscriber but because I didn’t have time to use the language tools on the website I downgraded and now the option has disappeared from my feed page………
Siva