Hi there,
I use latr.fm (which is similar to Huffduffer) to add single episodes to my custom RSS feed that I created for later use.
The bookmarklet in the Browser (iOS and desktop) does not find the link to the file. Is that something podlove or latr.fm can fix?
*I’ve heard about problems with that Podlove player before. I think whomever it was I spoke to last about it wrote to the Podlove people to tell them about it. Basically, you’re supposed to click the “Download mp3” link. When the bookmarklet runs, it listens to clicks on any link on the page and opens a popup with latr.fm telling it, where the link originally pointed to. The podlove player, sadly, does it’s own javascript-trickery and therefore can’t work with the bookmarklet.
I joined the community specifically to ask about Huffduffer, which I consider very important.
My podcast is currently published using Blubrry’s WP plug-in, and I would like to switch to Podlove’s publisher because I believe in what you are doing and that it provides a better experience for listeners and for me. The problem is, I really want people to be able to use either Huffduffer or latr.fm or other similar services to be able to add single episodes to a personal feed. I regard that as a very important way to enable better sharing of audio.
So far, I have looked at a few sites that use the Podlove player, and none of them seem to work with Huffduffer.
So, my question: are there any plans to address this so that services like Huffduffer can see the audio file?
We tried to address this by giving feedback to Huffduffer years ago. But the developer never responded or made any changes to the service which we therefore consider mostly dead.
Podlove Publisher provides plenty of metadata already that could easily be used to make Huffduffer work on publisher sites without any problems.
So in a way you are approaching the wrong side here. if you. an make the developer respond to this we will happily cooperate and find a solution but without communication there is not much we can do.
Thanks @timpritlove.
I am in direct e-mail contact with the developer of latr.fm and pointed him to this thread now. I asked him to get in contact Podlove directly (he said he tried before though).
What the podlove player lacks that both I and the Huffduffer-bookmarklet depend on are direct links to the audio file. As far as I’ve seen there’s no way to get that from the podlove player. Am I wrong?
A direct link to an audio file. Usually, somewhere to close to a podcast player people put a link directly to the mp3 file named “Download MP3” or whatever. An ordinary link with no fancy things: <a href='episode.mp3'>Download</a>.
That kind of a link. I don’t detect anything and don’t make any guesses. I make the user find and click on that link. They can usually find it quickly themselves – assuming it’s there
Hi!
I’m one of the Podlove devs, working on the web player. Thank you @mikker for joining the conversation. I’ve got some further questions to fully grasp the problem and come up with possible solutions.
Short term:
The User would click specifically that link?
How does the user know what to click? Is there a latr.fm logo/button?
What if said link would be inside an iframe?
Long term:
Do you already have custom solutions for special cases? In other words: How ‘smart’ is that bookmarklet already?
As @timpritlove suggested: Why link to an audio file instead of rich metadata (RSS, XML, JSON)?
Huh, a lot of questions … Looking forward to evolve the podcasting landscape. ;0
To be more precise: I would prefer markup that does not show up on the page itself by default (without using CSS trickery) and that explicitly states “this is the episode file of the podcast in the following format (MIME-Type)”. This would enable you to select the format you want, know which link is actually pointing to the episode file.
Using assumptions like “everything that ends in .mp3 is an episode file in MP3” might work many times but is nothing I would love to rely on if other options are around.
Huffduffer’s bookmarklet presents all the links it finds on the page, and it is up to the user to select the correct one of those. I don’t know any more about how it works, but will try and get @adactio to take a look here.
Doesn’t the suggestion of using meta information require the person publishing the podcast – not using Podlove, maybe – to ensure that the meta information is correct?
I think maybe you are making this more complicated than need be, @timpritlove.
Meta-data is great. You are absolutely right that that could avoid any misconceptions.
The reason I make the user pick the link is that I get to not make any guesses as to what link is the direct one. Sometimes they guess wrong but then that has nothing to do with me.
In my opinion, it’s always a good idea to link to the actual file - whether you do it because of latr.fm or not. Just like you should provide a link directly to your rss feed.
@timpritlove and @line_o: Could you maybe make an account on https://latr.fm and try the bookmarklet yourself? It’s free and you can delete it afterwards (unless of course you find out that it is really handy )
Will do. Looking at the first page: you might want to consider using our Podlove Subscribe Button to make subscribing to your RSS feed with the Podcast Client of choice easy.
I installed the “Listen latr” bookmarklet and tried it. I assumed it would start a automatic search for links and/or metadata in the page but as it seems it does nothing for the user but ask for a visible link to be clicked. This pretty much reduces the “discovery” of files to directly visible direct links to the media files.
So I don’t really know what we could do to provide hints to the media files from within the web player instead of plain old links and user-visible links. Any ideas?
Thanks very much for the update. I am less interested in the latr.fm bookmark than I am in huffduffer. Did you also get anywhere with making the audio file more available to that?
