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!
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 🙂
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 :-/
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.
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.
Here is a direct link for you.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=311776560 <--this is US portal though.A search with keywords Masonic Central will get you both feeds. The new one is clearly marked BTR.
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.
Vit,
I post all the shows onto this URL for easy Down loading: https://freemasoninformation.com/about/masonic-central-podcast/
I have noticed that BTR does mask the MP3 file (why I don’t know) and embed everything into their flash player. It is possible to pull from our BTR show page, at: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Masonic-Central and then clicking download. But, how that works on a Linux machine I don’t know.
Greg
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.