The garbage error has to do with a failing SPAM catcher. We will eventually get a new anti-SPAM thing and that message will go away. As for the ID3 tags, the issue has been discussed and we are addressing it. When we do it we want to be sure to consider new features that may be coming up in the future so that we don’t have to redo it again later. We will post about it soon.

Cheers, tom

P.S. I always see the following error below the message entry box. I have no idea what it means:
A GARBAGE ERROR has occured!
Go to the Contact section and notify to me!

Media tags — good suggestion, I’m on it. Anti-PWU gizmo — as I hinted to here, http://www.chinesepod.com/blog/?p=251 , I’ll wager a guess that a full blown grammar checker may be a bit much to ask. Besides, I think people kind of enjoy your amusing relationship with the PWU patrol.

For a few lessons, I thought maybe CPod was starting to prepare for data mining with content after Function and Grammar. But then the last two lessons had “no tags” Was this the idea? If it is may I suggest we ALL figure out what the tags might be ? There are now 200 lessons still not an insurmountable amount of data to go through to figure out what those tags should be.

For instance in the future I would love to be able to query and get Intermediate Lesson high in adverbs of frequency to restudy. Other people, as Ken has suggested, may want lessons on doing business in China. Two very different purposes.

Maybe I am dreaming. I sort of thought those categories were the start of preparing for the future.

BTW I am looking for an anti-PWU gizmo or thingy . Maybe we should seek Bazza’s help if we can only get him away from The Devil Beside You show.

Mike in Jubei

Thx for the help.

Ken

Most of what you are requesting is already there or can be achieved.

First, in Itunes - Podcasts, go to the ChinesePod podcast header, right click and select Get Info. Input Education to the Grouping field. The header, all previously downloaded podcasts and future podcasts will then have Education in the Grouping field.

Right clicking anywhere in the field headers will give you the option to select addtional fields to be displayed, select Category and the lesson levels will be revealed.

Artist is already ChinesePod.com

The podcast name contains three elements e.g. 中级43 How’s Business?:
1) Lesson level, in Chinese characters, in this case intermediate - 中级, which can also be copied and pasted into smart playlists contain/not contain fields for selecting or sorting
2) The lesson’s sequential number in that level, in this case 43
3) The lesson’s title, in this case How’s business?

The only problem is the lesson numbers being 1,2,3, not 01. 02, 03 for the first 9 lessons at each level. However these can easily be edited in the podcast name. Infact we’ll soon have a problem in Newbie level when lesson 100 arrives and then all previous 99 lessons will need to be changed into 001, 002 etc. Maybe CPod could do something about that?

Hope that helps.

Just a friendly suggestion. It might be worth adding an extra zero to the lessons that are only one digit (like 1 through 9). So, when they’re like 01, 02, … , 09, then they line up and sort consistently on an iPod. That is, they’ll sort like 01, 02, 03, … , 09, 10, 11, … , 18, 19, 20, 21, … .

Otherwise, when the single-digit lesson numbers don’t have a zero in front of them, the lessons tend to sort like 1, 10, 11, 12, … 19, 2, 20, 21, … .

Thanks for the good work!
Barry

Mike of Pleco is an outstanding guy. I think he’s a one-man shop and I don’t know how he handles the support as well as he does. Anyway, the Pleco dictionaries work great, I’ve installed the latest version on a Palm Z22, although there was some effort with that, and the old version Oxford dictionary works well on my Sony Clie which is quite an aged machine now a days.

Hopefully you’ll have no problem with pdfs on your new Palm, espcially if it comes with, or you add a new Adobe Acrobat pdf reader. Please let me know if you’re successful. If there are any other Cpod 迷 that have the pdfs successfully show the Chinese on their portable devices, please let me know!

BTW, the pdfs are fine for my pc, just the pc doesn’t seem to fit in my ‘pocket’! And darn it nobody has given me a snazzy iPod. I’m not expecting it from Ken b/c he won’t even give Jenny any hongbao!