WTF is a Podcast?

I've been talking a good bit lately on podcasting, mainly since I started my own. But I'm also aware that the casual computer user, or iTunes listener, has no clue what this mysterious new service is. So I thought I'd just explain it a little, if only to my boost listener count and flex my geek-muscles.

Podcasts get their name from combining iPods with radio broadcasting. It all started when a few folks started recording indie talk radio programs and releasing them online, intending them to be uploaded to iPods and listened to on the road. Of course, Apple, knowing what was happening, decided to push the technology into the mainstream with its release of iTunes 4.9, which offered podcast subscriptions. They made an entire department of their wildly successful iTunes Music Store just for the podcasts, and featured many of the more commercial releases, as well as the indie ones that started it all. It seems like almost every talk radio DJ now has a podcast of their radio show, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Inside Mac Radio, and more. Podcasting is quickly becoming a louder companion to the blog.

But how does podcasting work? Well, that took me a while to figure out, and even longer to implement. Basically, you need to create two things: an MP3 file and an XML file. Both are uploaded to the internet, and the XML file sends out a handy RSS feed (the same things that blogs emit). The RSS feed is that tells the subscribers that there is a new version, and initiates the downloading of the new episode. All of this is automated once the subscription is made. The MP3 files are compressed a good bit, which of course leads to slightly less than standard quality, but much quicker downloads. Then again, podcasting was mainly intended for spoken word (which doesn't need the high bit rate that music does).

In order to make our podcast, I used Apple's Garageband to record the music and to finalize each episode, and the open-source Audacity Sound Editor to chop everything up. I had been using Audacity for a while now, mainly to edit music for the Cellar Dwellers, but this was my first time messing around with Garageband. When we released our commercial, it took me almost five hours to get that in order, and it took me even longer to finish the first episode. But each time I went back to it, things went smoother and faster, until the fourth episode took me just an hour to finish. Converting them and compressing them took up the most amount of time and all I had to do was sit there.

Some of the more common questions people have asked me about podcasts are the following:

1. Does it cost anything? No. One of the few free things located on the iTunes Music Store are the podcasts. Because they are basically radio shows, the majority of them are free to the public. The only ones that really cost money are a few of the professional talk radio shows.

2. Do you have to have iTunes to hear a podcast? Nope! Considering that they were around before iTunes supported them, there are many ways to get the cast. The one I chose was Podcast.net which lets you stream them right there on the page, instead of downloading anything.

3. Are podcasts for losers? No... look at me, I use them!....

So that's the simple side of podcasting. It's not a very hard concept to grasp, but it's a really sweet feature once you start using it. It's really addicting. Each day I check out the "Today's Top 100 Podcasts" and see all the hot new shows. Hopefully someday mine will get up there!

Posted by MikeRubino at August 25, 2005 7:33 PM | TrackBack