iPodarmy

The Podsafe Music Network is up and running and looks to be a pretty good resource for podcasters to fine podsafe music. It’s still in beta and needs some work. The sign-up form, for example, is a bit poorly designed (small type, bad error messages, the whole bit) and why do they need my phone number? Ah, so many sites out there could benefit from some good old people-centered design.

Ah well.

The good news is that some of the tunes seem pretty good.

iTunes 4.9 was released yesterday and it’s pretty darn cool. It has a few minor problems, but in general I really like getting my podcasts right in iTunes like that.

However, even with the podcast directory, I don’t see iTunes as the best place to find content. I’ll be using Odeo for that.

Odeo is to iTunes in a way Flickr is to iPhoto for me. Not in the way they function really, although Odeo is alot like Flickr, but that they serve two different purposes. iTunes is my playing / catching application, and I’m hoping Odeo can be my social/network/find content application. It looks pretty good so far.

I really like the functionality of iTunes as it relates to podcasts and the social aspect of Odeo is nice too. Two great tastes??? We’ll see.

I’ve been reading recently about Odeo a podcasting service that proclaims to be:

making it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content for your iPod (or whatever MP3-player-type-deal you prefer).

There has been quite a bit of hype surrounding Odeo, and based on these screenshots it looks pretty nifty. I wonder though, is it too late? Apple has said that they will add podcasting functionality to iTunes so I’m sure many will use that as their default “podcatcher.”

What about creating content? Well, I use GarageBand and Audio Hijack and contrary to some popular belief, it was pretty darn easy to get it going. I plan on doing something more pofessional down the road, and Odeo seems like it would be a backwards step for someone like me.

But who knows, it looks nice and may have some features that are of benefit that I don’t know about. One thing I wish it had was a better way to find music for podcasting. What’s out there now is pretty lame.

I wish Odeo luck and will give it a spin when it’s out, I just wonder if they were a bit too slow getting it out there.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last month trying to find good music that is podcast friendly, legal to freely share and/or “podsafe.” To be quite honest it’s been a struggle, but it has gotten easier as I’ve discovered new ways to find good music to add to my podcast. It’s not not exactly easy but it’s manageable and seems to get better as the days tick by.

I really wish I’d known many of the avenues to find podsafe music a few weeks ago though, so I thought I’d take a few minutes and write up some of the things I’ve learned. Below are several things you can try, and a few places you can look, to find good podsafe music. As always, when in doubt check with the artist or label before you assume something is podsafe, I can’t guarantee everything you find from these tips is legal to share.

Read more…

[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.

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.