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The biggest broadcaster in Norway today announced that they have to cut back on the podcasts they offer because the music is getting too expensive for the number of listeners they have. An "easy" solution here would be to increase the number of listeners, but practically this is difficult.

One possibility that came up in the discussion following the announcement was ideas around replacing music.

A lot of programs/radiostations these days are using something called formatting for the music part. This means there are people that are putting together and deciding what music that can be played. In other words, the music is more of a filler than actually tied into the program.

The idea would be to have a kind of playlist distributed together with the podcast or a completely new format alltogether that allow substitution of music.

The radiostation can then edit out the songs and insert a tag or XML command to pick the same song from the users own library. If he/she do not have that song, there could be a kind of mood tagging that allows a different song to be picked.

This would especially help in those cases where the type of song is not irrelevant - where the mood is set by the song choice.

I know it is a little bit abstract and I invite to a debate about this to see if we can iron out something that would work.

It is a golden opportunity to set a standard for the whole world to follow. And what would be better if this could be done in Amarok first?

One way to do this would be to use the OpenOffice way - a zip file with the elements packed together with an XML file. This way the system would support podcasts made with different codecs.

Amarok is not going to implement an entirely new multimedia format that is not used anywhere by anyone. That is not really the role of music player developers. If someone else developed this Amarok could implement support if it was an open format, but Amarok really doesn't have the ability to get content distributors to adopt their formats.

Ok. If this is the policy, then there is nothing that can be done about it

Would you happen to know who should make such a format?

The other thing is if it should be a completely new format at all or just an enhancement of existing playlists.

Do you know a place where it would be appropriate to brainstorm such a concept?

I'm afraid I don't, sorry.

Ok. No problem. I'll get back with more info if I can find it later Thx.