(EDITS: I made a couple of quick additions to this post. Turns out there is at least one person who cares whether I try out this plugin again, and it’s the developer. One nice thing I can definitely say about the plugin is that the developer has always been pretty engaged with the plugin’s users. I vaguely recall having some communication with him online half-a-decade ago when I first started looking into the plugin. See the comments on the post…)
I actually installed the “Blubrry Powerpress” plugin on here way back at the beginning when I noticed it had some (at the time) rudimentary .ogg [vorbis] audio support. I played with it a little and then never did much with it. (EDIT for clarity: this was almost half-a-decade ago – back in August 2010. If you go all the way back to that first audio post [the “TuberculosisBurgers” episode of “Stir-Fried Stochasticity”], that one was posted via the “Blubrry PowerPress” plugin. Quite a bit of development has gone on with the plugin since them but I’ve not gotten around to trying to use it again since…yet.)
Since I’m switching to .opus for everything anyway, I’d been thinking about just removing the plugin (after I go back and find the one or two posts I made using it, to fix them to not require it), but I just noticed that the new 6.0 version has finally added support for .opus, according to a line buried in the changelog.
Still not sure if I’ll keep it and try it out some more or just purge it. The homepage for blubrry.com has adopted a style that looks like a child produced by Windows 8 and an iPod advertisement after a drug-fuelled orgy. Ick. Big flat ugly blocks of text and bland graphics, and almost “mystery-meat navigation”. If that’s indicative of where the plugin is heading, I should probably just purge it (I get the impression that the plugin is more focussed on iTunes™ and “Search Engine Optimization” than any other features, but I’m not really concerned about Apple’s mandates on this blog) (EDIT:What I’m getting at here is that it’s not clear how much of the plugin I’ll actually get any use from if I’m not on iTunes, essentially. Is it going to be like having Microsoft Excel installed when I only need to do some basic math?).
(Another post-posting edit for clarity: the “dumbed-down-to-an-iTunes-ad” interface that Windows 8 went all in for is the second-worst trend in the name of “mobile-friendliness” in my personal opinion – second only to websites that now pop up as a giant background graphic filling the screen, which you then have to scroll down past to actually see the “content” you clicked on the link to get to in the first place…and keep scrolling because it’s giant “easy-reader” text, I assume so it’s legible on tiny phone screens. Yes, I’m looking at YOU, medium.com, among others. The only concern related to the plugin is that it suggests a doubling-down on iTunes-and-other-proprietary-services-related features and a moving away from the simple self-hosting I’m interested in as development goes on.)
Since the closest thing to a formal “New Year’s Resolution” is to do a lot more web audio production, I could probably use the plugin, but I certainly don’t NEED it. I’ll consider it while I work on getting some audio produced.
Does anybody still reading this have an opinion either way?