I have been giving some serious thought to working with Andrew Witte in creating ‘audio.case.edu’. The site would function nearly identically to ‘photos.case.edu’ in that users could login, upload an audio file and tag it with multiple categories, and then be able to see a list of audio files in each category/user. Administrators could maintain moderated categories that require approval before an audio file can be posted to it. Each category would have it’s own RSS feed - allowing for external applications such as iTunes to directly connect to the feed and play the audio files just like a radio station moves from track to track. This is known as podcasting, which has been greatly growing in popularity.
The site would be coded as a Ruby on Rails application, just as photos.case.edu is. I’m hoping to get my hands deeper in the Ruby code, with assitance from Andrew. Unlike photos.case.edu, it would provide a very flexible category creation system allowing users to submit new categories as easy as submitting new audio files. While this infinite flexibility will exist, a select number of categories will be system defined to provide a basic framework to encourage correct tagging.
As I have a ton of hard drive space on CHOD to devote to this project, I would be happy in hosting it until someone, say USG or ITS, decides to take it on. Undergraduate Admission has unofficially expressed an interest in this project and I’m hoping that the music department would participate by uploading recordings of concerts. The Case radio station, WRUW, would be a long term goal. I’m not quite sure how we could handle that. Possibly an entire RSS feed devoted to them with a single entry linking to their already provided webcast stream. This is kind of redundant, but I would want this system to be complete.
Before any of this happens, I am seeking the opinion of Jeremy Smith - the ITS and Case guru on all things syndicated. Perhaps this system is not necessary (as blog.case.edu can function in a very similiar manner), or at the very least, can be improved on from what I have listed here.