The portable music revolution was led by Apples Ipod but now encompasses as many as 20 million portable audio devices worldwide and this community of gadget users is re shaping the music industry day by day. Introducing a new way to listen to media has also brought about changes to the methods of distribution and downloading is now commonplace with radio stations more likely to have a download chart than a top 20, but online radio the real-time streaming of music is faltering.

Users with digital audio devices want a rich experience and one that streaming real-time radio can't currently offer, the sound quality is poor with highly compressed low resolution media and reliability isn't great either. Plus this new Ipod generation is used to have music on demand, gone are the days when people would sit happily around waiting for something to start.

The download generation are more used to having media on tap Sky+ style, so what's the answer, Podcasting? Maybe....

First off lets look at what Podcasting is, in fact the first thing to deal with is the name, while Podcasting may sound funky and appeal as a name its not very descriptive as Podcasting is really another form of downloading audio based media files to any portable device or home PC.

What is a Podcast?

A Podcast consists of high resolution MP3 or other audio files wrapped in a RSS feed, RSS or really simple scripting is widely used on the web as a means to create news feeds or product updates that can be read by browsers and other websites.

RSS 2.0 is used to underpin Podcasting by the use of the enclosures tag, the RSS feed is exactly the same XML code as the one you can get BBC news through except that the enclosure tag is used to point at media files (in this case audio). A Podcasting client such as Ipodder reads the RSS feed which is made available on a website URL and downloads the files highlighted by the enclosure tag in the background, as soon as all the files are ready the new Podcast is shows as available in the client.

You can then listen to the Podcast at your desktop or you can set iPodder to synchronise  the files and play list with your Ipod or portable audio device. As you can see Podcasting isn't really that complicated, its a different use of a stable and tested technology (RSS) to provide a way to download high resolution files in the background.

You can add multiple Podcast to the client so it will watch all of these URL's for an updated feed, the RSS script contains time and date information making this process very easy and enabling the client to download a new Podcast as soon as it is published. It's also quite secure as the whole Podcast system is subscription based, you search for a Podcast you would like to subscribe to and only those which you have chosen are downloaded to your device.

How do I find a Podcast feed?

Well beyond just using a search engine like Google, most of the client software has a community around it and some like iPodder have a listing section, Podcast can be speech based (like audio books) or a mixture of music and speech, we've seen DJ sets and even walking tours of cities sent out as Podcasts.

How do I Podcast?

Put simply building the Podcast feed in RSS is the simple bit as is hosting it on your website or Blog, perhaps the slightly more complicated bit is authoring your Podcast audio file(s) on a Mac you can use the freeware applications soundflower and soundbed, the combination of these allows you to take a line input and mix it with MP3 files to create a Podcast file.

In the PC world you can use an application like allrecorder or some of the semi pro radio tools to create your Podcast, there are many freeware applications that will allow you to mix a line input such as a microphone with MP3 or WAV files. Its worth noting that you'll want to output MP3 files for your Podcast as they are relatively small and accepted by most clients.

Do remember that copyright does cover Podcast and if you use commercial music there are royalties due via MCPS or PRS and that any music you use needs to be cleared, its often easier to use royalty free music to avoid the hassle.

Is this the future then?

Certainly the digital generation want to take more control over what they listen to and Podcasting is yet another manifestation of that desire, being forced to be at a fixed location at a fixed time is not a business model that works as the internet radio stations are discovering. Podcasting is here right now and making the portable audio device even more useful, perhaps the next logical step will be a Podcast for portable media players, so you can watch video in the same manner.

Check out our reviews of potable audio devices

Published - 26/03/2005

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