I recently discovered dopeden’s Decks By the Beach podcast. Basically it’s a feed of DJ mixes. I downloaded all that I can find and have been enjoying most of them. Can’t complain about the price.
Listening to Dave Bullock’s mix on my iPod Touch, I was surprised to notice the ability to fast forward within the mix. There was also cover art, albeit quite grainy, for each stop. Neat.
Turns out the MPEG-4 file format, which Apple uses with the AAC audio encoding, supports chapter markers. Since the format is locked up in the ISO MPEG-4 standard, which you have to pay money for, the best info I could find about this feature was a tutorial on how to add them to an audio file using Apple’s GarageBand.
One of my major nits with DJ mixes on the Web is that you get them in one unnavigable wad of MP3 bits. Glad to know there’s at least one standard way of cleaning up this shortcoming. Too bad it’s not ridiculously convenient for DJs to capture their mixes this way.