It appears Rob from Podcast411 and Today in iPhone is having a little trouble getting his iPhone back from his 15-month-old son. What could possess the boy to run off with Rob’s new toy? Listen closely and find out.

I’ve had a number of people ask me recently if and when I might offer an enhanced AAC podcast feed for Dave’s Lounge. There are two reasons why I’ve never offered an AAC version of this show.

The first is that I don’t want to limit my audience to iTunes and iPod users. MP3 is still the most popular and most portable file format for audio, and if I switched to AAC, I would immediately lose about 8% of my total audience. My goal has always been to attract as many new listeners as possible, and it’s easier to do that with MP3 files rather than AAC files. If every digital audio player out there played AAC files, it might be different, but for now, MP3 is the best way to reach everyone.

The second reason is that I don’t really want to create two separate feeds for MP3 and AAC listeners. You can chalk that up to time constraints or laziness or whatever, but I feel better knowing that there’s one feed where everyone can go to get the latest episode of Dave’s Lounge. It just feels more inclusive that way.

There’s also the fact that I don’t own a Mac, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there, is it?

So that’s why I only produce shows in MP3 format. I won’t say it’ll be like that forever, but until AAC overtakes MP3 as the audio format of choice for everyone on every platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), this podcast will remain an MP3, because that allows everyone to come to Dave’s Lounge.

Dave’s Lounge will return next week. Stay subscribed.

Folks,

I’m throwing this out to the podcast audience in the hope that someone might be able to point me in the right direction.

I am currently in the process of fixing all the tags on my giant MP3 collection. I’ve gotten all the full albums fixed, and now I’m onto the singles. However, I have a huge number of loose singles, and close to half of them appear to be without tags. Going through and tagging files individually will take a very, very long time.

So what I’m looking for is a program that will read the name of a file, every one of which is named Artist - Title.mp3, take the artist and title info from the filename and put that into each file’s ID3 tag. I’ve found tons of programs that do the opposite — take the ID3 tag and change the name of the file — but I haven’t found one that will read the filename and parse that name into an ID3 tag.

If anyone out there knows of such a program, post a comment here. My MP3 collection is about 76 gigabytes right now, and the singles take up somewhere between 20 and 30 GB, so anything that will help me avoid going through all those old files individually would be a big help.

Thanks, everyone.

I’m taking a break from the podcast this week, but I shall return in June with some new playlists for all of you. There is some very good music in the pipeline, folks. You won’t want to miss it…

Folks,

I’ve encountered some delays in getting #79 together — probably just my lousy time management skills coming to the forefront again — but I do intend to have it ready for everyone sometime this week, and hopefully sooner rather than later. Don’t go anywhere…

You may have noticed here on the new site that there are no longer any direct download links, just the Flash-based audio players. For those listeners who want an easy way to go back and get those past episodes, I’ve created a direct download page that provides direct links to MP3 files for every episode of this podcast thus far. You can find that page here:

http://www.daveslounge.com/download

You’ll find links to each episode’s show notes as well, so you can see which artists are on each show before downloading the show itself.

I’ve made a little progress on the Wordpress installation — and a big thank you goes out to Evgeniy Kaschenko and everyone else who emailed to help — but I haven’t had a chance to work on it this weekend, as I hosted my first Wii party on Friday, which was a huge success, and spent the rest of the weekend either sleeping it off or working on other web sites.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to point the daveslounge.com home page directly to the old Liberated Syndication page, which should let me work on the new site in the background. It will also let me put together the next show in the meantime. I hope to have the new site ready in the next week or two.

Thanks for being patient with me, folks.

Folks,

I’ve been busy putting together the new Wordpress-based Dave’s Lounge web site since the weekend, so I haven’t been able to put a show together this week. At some point in the next few days I plan to move the site onto its new platform, and it will probably be a little messy for a few days. Trust me, though — it’ll be worth it when it’s done.

Further announcements are forthcoming…

Folks, I know you’re all waiting for a new show, and I apologize for making you wait so long yet again, but I am really backed up right now, and I didn’t want to put together a subpar show, and that’s exactly what the show I was trying to make tonight would have been.

Give me a little more time. I will try to get this train back on its tracks very soon…