Well, OpenMHz now has a Podcast! OpenMHz is the website I created that makes it easy for folks to share the recordings of Public Safety radio systems that they capturing using my Trunk Recorder program.
I recently added a feature that lets people take a collection of interesting calls and group them together into an Event. In some cases, interesting could be something important, like DC’s Office of Unified Communication constantly dispatching units to incorrect locations, over and over and over again… Or something more quizzical, like a Metro operator who was drunk and fell asleep while driving a train…
The Events features makes it easier to tell a story using the recordings on OpenMhz. This got me thinking about ways to make it easier to share these stories and the idea of turning each Event in to a podcast episode popped into my head.
It ended up not being too tough to do. In OpenMHz, each call is an individual M4A. All I had to do was use FFMpeg to stitch the files together, into a single long recording. I then add chapter markers to the file to mark each transmission and used the Talkgroup of the transmission for the chapter title. With the help of node-podcast, I generated the Podcast Feed and dynamically inserted an episode for each Event.
It is still a work in progress, so let me know what you think. Is this concept interesting? What additional context would be helpful? How else could events be expanded?