cygweb

I have been reading your posts and have glanced at the ipodder info that you have linked. I cannot get past thinking you need an Ipod to participate, but I am guessing that I am wrong that you only need the Ipod if you intend to take it on the go with you.

I am audio technically challenged with most of this stuff. I had a Shoutcast feed running for about a week years ago, just to see if I could do it. Other than that, my only experience is ripping and uploading content to ICYG.

In order for me to get a little more hyped I need to take some time to read thoroughly the links you provided and educate myself a bit more on how I could use this and enjoy it. Your knowledge of audio and software associated with it is impressive, at least to me.

Thanks. I've been doing stuff with audio on computers since the days I built my first PC (a 486DX2/66) with my dad's help and he chose a Gravis Ultrasound sound card. It was advanced for its time, and really opened me up to this world. I've been doing MIDI, multitrack recording, editing, and encoding on my PCs ever since.

You definitely don't need an iPod to take advantage of podcasting. Moving the podcasts to an iPod or other portable MP3 player is an optional last step in the chain. The way I see it, podcasting is like audio blogging, except for the fact that you use RSS enclosures to indicate to a client that you have an audio payload they can download and listen to whatever way they want. Audio blogging usually assumes that the listener will stream the audio from your site interactively, while connected to the Net. Podcasting lends itself to having a longer time window than audio blogging, hence it's a different way of both producing and consuming audio content via blogs.

Think of it like this: you and I decide to host a weekly BDFL "talk show" with the other owners. I record, edit, mix, and encode it as an MP3 file. We put it on the BDFL website and post an article that indicates in the RSS feed that it's an enclosure. People with enclosure-aware RSS clients like iPodder that are subscribed to the feed become aware of the new post and enclosure when they request the feed, and their client determines when it will download the file and where it will save it to. The MP3 is synced to their portable player and is flagged as a new, unheard item. Or perhaps a "new podcasts" playlist on the user's PC is maintained, and they listen to it there.

I have been exploring Podcasting today and have listened to a few shows that are out there. Podcasting is an interesting tool and I can see that if you had a portable MP3 player why it is even better. Talk and music radio when and how you want to listen to it. Very cool.

I'm probably going to put together an experimental Cygweb podcast to get my feet wet. I need to see if my Logitech Internet Chat headset has a suitable mic. If not, I go with the semi-pro equipment.

I started trying to use Audacity to put things together and was annoyed by its lack of volume envelopes - they make it easy to configure editable fades. I'm breaking out the Cakewalk Home Studio for this...

I listened to one feed that was of very bad quality, IMO. Linux Link Tech Show, I had to crank up my volume to hear their show, though I will probably listen to more of their shows as there might be something there I may be interested in. So I think a lot of folks are still testing how software and hardware.

The other shows were acceptable and I pretty much enjoyed every show I checked out.

Not to spam your comments but I just want to state, by bad quality I meant sound quality. ;)