Masonic Central is back up on Itunes!

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I just found confirmation that Masonic Central, since its move to Blog Talk Radio, is now back up on ITunes!

How to find it? Your first option is to go to ITunes, and in the search box, do a search for Masonic Central. What you’ll find is the past Masonic Central Pod cast stream, and the NEW Masonic Central Blog Talk Radio Stream.

Or, you can follow this link:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=311776560 which will open the page in the I tunes app.

Thanks for pulling for listening to the program, and look for lots more coming up!

And, please let me know if you can’t find the show. I’ve had some reports that the Blog Talk Radio Version isn’t available in Canada on Itunes, but I’m curious if its available now.

Greg – Masonic Central!

ituneshowtoI just tested it on a 2nd machine, and it comes up, as well as had Dean test from Halifax (CA) earlier today, and he was able to pull it up.  So the show is there, waiting to be found!

Posted in Masonic Central.

Greg Stewart

View posts by Greg Stewart

A devoted student of the Western Mystery Traditions, Greg is a firm believer in the Masonic connections to the Hermetic traditions of antiquity, its evolution through the ages and into its present configuration as the antecedent to all contemporary esoteric and occult traditions. He is a self-called searcher for that which was lost, a Hermetic Hermit and a believer in “that which is above is so too below.” Read more about Greg Stewart.

7 Comments

  1. A search on itunes gives no search results.

    Talkshoe with its immediate download link is starting to look better and better.

    Feel free to let us know if a link to the file download ever becomes available 🙂

  2. Shane Stevens says:
    > Vitruvius says:
    > > A search on itunes gives no search results.
    > >
    > > Talkshoe with its immediate download link is starting to look better
    > > and better.
    >
    > > Feel free to let us know if a link to the file download ever becomes
    > > available 🙂
    >
    > Not sure why it isnt showing up for you, I searched and sync’ed with
    > my iPhone lastnight. To make sure something didnt go wrong, I just
    > checked again and both feeds are there just as advertised.

    Can you provide a URL that I can check? I checked the following URL,
    and the results are negative: itunes.com (redirects to some apple
    site/URL). The returned error, after searching for keywords ‘masonic
    central’, is:
    No Match Found
    Your search request did not match any documents on apple.com. Please
    double check that all words are spelled correctly or try different
    (more general) keywords. For your assistance, we’ve provided links to
    commonly requested information below.

    > Here is a direct link for you.
    > http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=311776560
    > A search with keywords Masonic Central will get you both feeds. The
    > new one is clearly marked BTR.

    Again, please post a URL with a search box I can submit keywords
    ‘Masonic Central’ to, and successfully find a download link to the audio
    file of the latest podcast — if it works I’ll be the first to eat
    humble pie, and post here accordingly. If it doesn’t, then I’ll let you
    know too. I hope to be proven wrong, but as far as I can tell right
    now, you folks are seriously guzzling the Proprietary Koolaid right now
    with this recent shift from Talkshoe to BTR :-/

  3. Vit, I just tested it again, from 2 machines and found it. Dean tested it earlier today and found it too. I just posted a visual how to step by step to locate it, but it should come right to the top of a search.

  5. mtadmin said:
    > Vit, I just tested it again, from 2 machines and found it. Dean tested it
    > earlier today and found it too. I just posted a visual how to step by step > to locate it, but it should come right to the top of a search.

    Hi, I repeated the exact same search as before and this time 2 search
    results showed up (not sure what caused the delays to search results
    appearing previously).

    But even so iTunes still appears to be a proprietary trainwreck for
    anyone using a non-windows or non-mac operating system (OS) like linux.
    Here are the main problems I encountered as a linux user (and I’ll
    finish by documenting the workarounds I’ve found so far, in case there
    are any other poor souls trying to follow your show on a linux OS):
    – The iTunes software is only available for windows and mac platforms.
    – iTunes appears to be riddled with closed/secret protocols (e.g. using
    imts:// instead of http://) which again, don’t work for a linux user
    who can’t install unavailable iTunes software.
    So, linux users are locked out of this scheme from the outset.

    Now, here is a summary of the contortions I went through to simply
    download your podcast in MP3 format:
    1. Use ‘wget’ (a command-line file download utility) to try to download
    the original iTunes URL:
    – wget itms://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=311776560
    – This fails; error is ‘Unsupported scheme’ (referring apparently to
    the proprietary ‘itms’ scheme).
    2. Use ‘wget’ to try to download a modified form of the URL (change
    ‘itms’ to ‘http’):
    – This works, but ends up downloading a useless HTML page that it has
    been redirected to.
    3. The re-direction in #2 above can be avoided (a little googling
    reveals) if we pretend to be a Mac if you will, and give the web
    server phony credentials:
    – wget http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=311776560 -U “iTunes/4.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.2)”
    – “Oh you’re a Mac, now we like you!” and some XML file is
    successfully retrieved this time.
    4. When this XML file is searched for references to ‘mp3’, oh my, look
    what we find:
    – There are 2 URLs found:
    – http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Masonic-Central/2009/04/13/Martin-Faulks-on-Lewis-Masonic-Publishing.mp3
    – http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Masonic-Central/2009/04/06/Br-Peter-Millheiser-Editor-of-the-Hibiscus-Masonic-Review-journal-.mp3

    So there they are, finally, the actual MP3/audio files that can then be
    downloaded simply and directly, without any iTunes software at all. In
    fact they are not even stored on iTune servers, they are stored on BTR
    servers.

    The obvious question then is: why not simply offer the files for
    download directly from BTR without forcing people to go through the
    iTunes rigmarole? Why alienate people using Linux by using all this
    unnecessary obfuscation and proprietary technology?

    I know that I can stream the audio from the BTR site, but what I really
    want to be able to do is load an audio file on my portable player and
    go. Again, Talkshoe accommodated this very simply and easily by doing
    the obvious, and just offering a download of the MP3 file. BTR does not
    offer this convenience in a simple, open, and convenient fashion for all
    users.

    I wonder if the URLs I found above could be posted on a suitable (blog?) location so that those who don’t want to (or cannot) use iTunes can still get the file as we were able to before?

    Sincerely,
    V.

  7. Hi,

    OK, I said I would eat humble pie if I was wrong, and it turns out I am — doh!

    I still stand by everything I’ve said about iTunes excluding Linux users; until a version of the iTunes software is released for Linux, then Apple/iTunes continues to exclude those who are running non-Windows and non-Mac operating systems.

    But it looks like I was distracted by the iTunes issue, as I had thought that
    that was the only way to download the mp3 audio file. This is not true, as you point out: one can simply click the ‘Download’ link further down the BTR page, and download the MP3 file.

    So, in summary, Linux users can’t use iTunes, but in this case they don’t have
    to anyway, in order to directly download the MP3 file.

    Excellent — now I can go back to ignoring iTunes like before 😉

    V.

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