iPodarmy

It took me a bit longer to get this one together! Sorry about that. I’m going to shoot for once a week, but I highly doubt I’ll be able to keep to that. I don’t want to burn out just when I’m starting to have some fun with this!

This time it might seem a bit awkward. That’s mainly due to the fact that I kept having interruptions. I try to set aside time to listen to music, pick some good stuff and record the podcast, but life has a way of getting in the way at times. Ah, well, the music is what matters and there is some good stuff in this one. It is funny to see how my voice and delivery changes as I record under different conditions. In this one you can really tell that it’s not done all in one sitting. Ah well, living and learning…

Link: Podcast #3 : May 25th, 2005 (49 minutes | 96kbps mp3 | 33.35mb)

Playlist

• “Lapis Lazuli” by Fragile Human Organs [Info]
• “In Words” by Instant Winner WA [Info at Garageband.com]
• “Let You Go” by Damsel Fly [Info]
• “Chicken Pox” by Noah23 [Info via Vu D’ici]
• “Curious Smile” by Pleasurecraft [Info]
• “Inside A Moment” by Infomatik [Info]
• “Do I Know You?” by PINE*am [Info]
• “La Isla Bonita” by 94th Street [Info]
• “More of The Same” by Howard Hello [Info]
• “Come With Me” by The Clintons [Info at Garageband.com]

[Via Corante & Matt May]

I’ve actually found some pretty good music over at Garageband so I was pretty excited to hear they’re making it easier for podcasters to find music to play. For me this has been the hardest part in getting my podcast going. I want to find great music, that’s legal for me to share, and then get it up so y’all can discover new stuff.

They’ve added a new Flash-based tool built specifically for podcasters to help them create their podcasts, and they’ve also made it, via their broadcast network, it much easier to find music and have people find your podcast.

All to often it’s just too hard to tell what’s “ok” to share and what’s not. Services like Garageband help and when they take the time to specifically address the needs of people like me it’s great because it means more good music more often!

[Via O’Reilly Radar]

At the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference, Steve Jobs tonight showed ipodder-like features in the next release of iTunes, supposedly available within about 60 days. I was glad to see this, since the “architecture of participation” has been the only one of the big Web 2.0 themes that Apple had seemed to be missing. He was slightly dismissive of populist podcasting, describing it as “Wayne’s World for radio”, and celebrating the arrival of professional radio stations into the market, but nonetheless, he was very high on the podcasting phenomenon, and the excitement that millions of users have displayed about it. In the Q&A, Jason Calcanis of Weblogs, Inc. asked if there was any possibility of using the iTunes music store for paid podcasting. Jobs replied that for the moment they were only considering it as free content, but that he was open to looking into it.

I see this as pretty neat. Not sure if it’s as world changing as some might say, but I know that I’d love to be able to cut out the middleware and gather podcasts directly in iTunes. Right now I’ve been using the new beta of NetNewsWire and that seems to be working fairly well, but it has problems with some casts getting them into iTunes. Losing that manual step would be very nice.

As well, I’d hope it’d make it easier for people to find, and hopefully listen to, my own content.

Podcasting is going to be featured in the next edition of Make Magazine.

[via Scoble]

Is podcasting really starting to hit the “big time?” I’m not sure, but I’ll be very interested in reading this. As a newbie to podcasting, and one who’s finding it very enjoyable, I’m always up for some new tips, tricks and techniques. It is a very interesting way of distributing content and I fully expect the buzz to continue for quite awhile now.

I was passed this musical baton thingy by B. Adam Howell, Ryan Brill and Shaun Inman.

Total volume of music files on my computer:

2.35 gigabytes (my external hard drive tells a much different story)

The last CD I bought was:

Perceptionists – Black Dialogue. A great disc. If you liked Mr. Lif’s I Phantom, you’ll love this.

Song playing right now:

“Walking With A Ghost” by Tegan And Sara (Fucking great song.)

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

• “Car” by Built To Spill
• “We’re All In This Together” by Ben Lee
• “Heart Problems” by Ted Leo & The Pharmacists
• “Decent Days & Nights” by The Futureheads
• “In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3” by Coheed and Cambria

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

• Mike Davidson
• Scrivs
• Nick Finck
• Matt May
• Geoff Smith

Well, I’m back again, and only a little over a week later! This time I’ve had to look way beyond Creative Commons licensed music. Frankly it’s pretty damn hard to find explicitly CC licensed music that isn’t electronic in nature. Not that I’ve got something against electronic or anything, my tastes just fall all over the place and I hate to limit myself.

As far as I can tell everything in this podcast is “A-OK” to share, and I’ve got some great stuff for y’all this time around.

Link: Podcast #2 : May 14th, 2005 (45 minutes | 96kbps mp3 | 32.60mb)

Playlist

• “Charlie” by Deadpan [Info at CCmixter.org]
• “No Denial” by El Centro [Info]
• “Boys and Children, Sing For Summer” by Those Transatlanctics [Info]
• “Don’t Fade Out” by Aerovox [Info]
• “Hidden Land” by GimmiJapan [Info]
• “Men of Station” by 13 & God (The Notwist & Themselves) [Info]
• “Fan of The Bean” by The Clintons [Info at Garageband.com]
• “Chasing The Sun” by Fire At Will [Info]
• “Not Heather” by Complete [Info at Garageband.com]
• “Simplicity” by Pleasurecraft [Info]
• “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” by The Hold Steady [Info]

Shortly after I launched this site last week I got an e-mail from my pal Mike D. He was curious to know what I thought was so special about podcasting. It’s obvious that podcasting is kind of a buzz-word right now, and many, like Mike, are wondering what all the fuss is over.

Well, if I were to sum it up in a word, that word would be “content.”

Podcasting is just a technology that enables yet another way to digitally distribute content. It’s a pretty nifty technology, but it’s not much more than that. As with blogging, it’s the content that is the most important aspect of it, not the technology itself. For some reason early adopters seem to become infatuated with the enabling technology, so much so that at times it overshadows that which it enables. That seems to be the case here with podcasting right now.

At least that’s how it seems from the outside looking in.

So what’s the deal with podcasting?

We’ve established, in my opinion anyway, that it’s the content, the podcasts themselves, that make podcasting worth talking about at all. But having established that, I’ve got to say that the technology, while not all that impressive, is pretty useful and does work very well as an enabler to get syndicated audio content out to an audience.

When I explain it to people who aren’t geeks I compare it to TiVo. You find some shows you like, set up your “TiVo-like” software to download them into your iTunes or whatever and you listen when you want.

At its core, a podcast is simply an audio file which can be produced in various ways. The content itself, in the case of my own podcast for example, is a bunch of mp3 files AudioHijacked into one big mp3 file. What makes that mp3 file into a true “podcast” is the ability for me to publish it via RSS and have people pull it down automatically via podcatching software.

What makes it somewhat special is the fact that you can subscribe to it, have it pulled down to you via the Web when it’s updated and then listen at your convenience. Again, kind of like TiVo, except it’s pretty much open to anyone. That’s pretty much all a podcast is. I mean, there is more, but basically that covers it.

Content, Content, Content

At the end of the day, I decided to do a podcast because I want to share music with people. The technology enables me to do that. That’s pretty much it. I consider it special because it’s allowing me to do something I enjoy and that is hopefully going to turn some people on to some good music. If I could clone myself (and my iPod) and have my clones go to people’s houses and play music for them, I’d do that. But, for now anyway, I’m stuck with podcasting.

BMI has a monthly podcast for unsigned bands called “See It Hear First” and, yeah, the actual ‘cast is a cheesy and unauthentic as the name. Most of the music, at least on the ‘cast I heard, is pretty cheesy and unauthentic as well. It’s not “bad” really, just…well about what you’d expect from a BMI podcast.

It’s pretty obvious they’re targeting recording industry types, but I couldn’t help getting the feeling this was something best steamed out of those crappy headsets you get on a long plane flight. I guess it’s worth nothing that BMI is looking into podcasting, but as far as the actual content goes—you can probably do yourself a favor and skip this one.

One of the most frustrating things about finding music (or any other content) to share is trying to understand all the licensing aspects and what’s ok to share and what isn’t.

Creative Commons was created in essence to make this a whole lot easier. When you do find some music you like that’s been licensed under a CC license, it’s pretty easy to tell whether or not you can use if for a podcast or what-have-you. The problem is, there are tons of artists out there that would be perfect for CC licensing that have no clue it ever exists.

This was my biggest hurdle in picking music for my podcast. I started out wanting to do a CC only podcast, but quickly realized many of the artist I wanted to play, while being open to sharing, just hadn’t heard of CC licensing. This isn’t a big surprise if you really think about it. Musicians are busy creating music and probably simply have visibility to geeky stuff like that. Maybe that’s why most of the CC licensed music you’ll find out there is of the electronic variety.

Over at the CC Wiki there is an initiative going to help come up with some ideas to get the word out and let people know about the benefits and opportunities that CC licensing can bring to artists. There is one such idea going on here in Seattle, and I was lucky enough to help this one along.

I hooked Matt May up with some friends of mine why are pretty heavily involved with Laptopbattle.org. For those of you who might not know what a laptop battle is, it’s kind of like a DJ Battle, but with laptops. It’s done mostly with samples and loops. It’s a ton of fun to watch and it takes quite a bit of creativity, talent and know-how to do well. The winner of the first one I went to won with a set done almost entirely with Star Wars samples—it was killer.

In any-case, it’s also a great opportunity, and great fit, for Creative Commons. We need more ways to help let artists know about CC licensing. I know it’d help me in my search to find good music to share with y’all.

Well, here it is. My very first podcast. It was fun times and I’m planning to do more. I’d like to thank all the people who helped me track down “share-firendly” and Creative Commons music to share. Please comment if you’ve got any feedback or just want to chime in on one of the artists. I’ve included a playlist below with links to info about most of who you’ll hear.

Link: Podcast #1 : May 6th, 2005 (49 minutes | 96kbps mp3 | 33.73mb)

Playlist

• “Lady In The Lake” by The Black Tories [Info]
• “La Rua Lucia Tabajara” by As Melhores Do La
• “Thirty Six” by Man In Grey [Info]
• “The Dragon’s RetorX” by ACK [Not really info]
• “Angry Hippo” by Model A [Info]
• “Blue Light” by MN Conrad [Info]
• “Perdition” by Micronaut [Info]
• “Tarnation: End Credits” by Max Avery Lichtenstein [Info]
• “Cherry” by Josh Woodward [Info]
• “To The Editor” by Those Transatlantics [Info]
• “Two Weeks To Die” by 94th Street [Info]