Saturday, August 7, 2021

Good to hear him again ~

So I wrote about finding and downloading a Paul Harvey archive a while back (http://whollydavid.blogspot.com/2021/02/paul-harvey-archive.html). It was wonderful but it's been sitting on my hard drive taking up space and I haven't been able to do anything with it.

I had this vision of being able to use recordings like this in a podcast for myself so that I could listen to things that I want to fill my head with and be able to pause and resume them easily and have them automatically uploaded and updated every day. But for a while I had no solution to that dream.

Last week I looked again at podcast apps and discovered one that could help me make my dream a reality. Podcast Addict https://podcastaddict.com/app is an app for iOS and Android that will treat a folder on the device as a virtual podcast. That means that whenever you put files in that folder it will present them in a playlist is a podcast for that folder and track which ones you listen to and which ones you have not listened to. I could set it to automatically delete them after listen to them, but I'm not quite there yet. But it also allows you to drop other files in the folder and it automatically updates the podcast feed that it creates and then let you play it.

Me being the tech oriented person that I am I automatically created a folder on my device and synchronized it with dropbox. Then in the dropbox folder of set up a way to drop audio files in that folder and then it synchronizes in the middle of the night every night with my device. And voilà ! A personal podcast that I want to dwell on throughout the day is now available to me.

One of the first things that I did after figuring out how to make it all work was drop a couple of the rest of the story files from Paul Harvey's archive. When I listened to that first set of recordings as if it was random and just dropped in my folder I actually teared up a little bit! I remember listening to Paul Harvey for so long and I enjoy his storytelling technique for so much. So when I heard him telling a story about Andrew Jackson and his parents I got a little emotional.

I love it when my technology touches me. Now I have to read up on legalities and see if I can offer Paul Harvey to more than just me. Because that would just be awesome!