Daily Podcast News

Have you just discovered Podcasting? Want to Podcatch? Well all you need to do is take a glance at my simple step guide to downloading, installing and using iPodder.

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Visit the iPodder.net homepage and click the link under download now. You will then be directed to Sourceforge, here you can click Podder.NET_0.11.zip and choose a corresponding mirror to download from. Next unzip the file and wait for the installation wizard to guide you through the process by following the instructions.

You should now see an iPodder icon on your desktop. When you double click it a mini icon will appear on your bottom toolbar. Now right-click the icon and choose options.

Application:

You will notice that you are subscribed to The Daily Source Code, Evil Genius Chronicles and The Gilmore Gang. If you want to try them out leave the box ticked, but if they don’t take your fancy just deselect them.

On the top left hand corner you can specify were your podcasts should download to. The default is set to C:\FeedDownload but may be best to change it to Podcasts to avoid any confusion. You can change to Refresh time from 30 minutes to as far as 1000 minutes, this time period may depend on the amount of Podcasts you are subscribed to. If you are only subscribed to one or two it may be best to leave a long refresh time.

Now to the main part of the application, the RSS Feed submission area. This is very simple process indeed, just travel to your favourite Podcaster site and click on their syndication feed and copy/paste it into this area and click “add feed”.

It will appear shortly in the box below along with the Feed name and the RSS location. The last option is to manually check for new podcasts by pressing the retrieve now button.

With the launch of the iPod shuffle last night, the more I think about it the more I see what a great tool it is for Podcasting. If you load this iPod with songs you can’t control in which order they are played meaning if you love playing a song over and over it’s not the device for you.

You don’t have a display and thus can’t easily choose which mp3 to play, so if life really “is random”, why not load it up with your favorite podcasts.

But with Podcasts you only want to hear a Podcast once and get rid of it. No one wants to listen to a 40 minute show or even a one minute show more than once. You know you’re going to be listening to Podcasts which you are subscribed to and listen to regulary.

I got the chance to test out the Nokia 9500 in the sound studio with 7 other Multimedia Students. We had an open discussion lead by Bernie Goldbach relating to Smart Mobs written by Howard Reingold. The opening sentences of each chapter were read out and we inserted our own opinions/views on what they actually meant and how they related to us.

I opened the Nokia Communicator on the desk which was the central feature of the room. I just had to hit the ‘my own’ button while I was on the main menu followed by record. Once the 30 minute session had ended I just had to click stop > menu and scroll down to save as and enter the file name. To take out the 512MB memory card I had to open the mobile from the back and pop it out. I later used the Memorex card reader to upload to my college PC, the computer recognised it but it had no data. After thinking everything was deleted it was pointed out to me that the card was upside down, not very clear from the device as to what way to insert it.

The sound clips were in amr format meaning I needed to use a simple converter program and change the four files to wav so I could listen to the sound quality. I tried uploading them to the xdrive but the college computers had problems uploaded such large files. When I got home Tuesday I tried from home, I selected the file to upload, it was uploading but gave no feedback as to if it was successful, unfortunately it never got there, so today at 7pm tonight I uploaded each one again. I know one of them appears on xdrive so at the moment I have just logged in to xdrive and I’m still waiting over 5 minutes to view my uploads to see if the rest made it.