Podcast.com News

We just talked about how award-winning science fiction authors are putting out their work as self-produced podcasts, and already the bar has been raised. Novelist J.C. Hutchins recently wrote three books, entitled Descent, Deceit, and Destruction, respectively, that make up a trilogy called the 7th Son. As he wrote the chapters he read them aloud, recorded them, and released them as podcasts, along the way picking up 30,000 listeners and getting his work profiled in the New York Times. That effort paid off as Hutchins just announced he signed a contract with St. Martin’s Press to publish Descent. Congrats to Hutchins on the contract and for promoting podcasting to the science fiction world.

For editing single audio files, Audacity has been the only free download worth noting in the past few years (no, that doesn’t include Garageband that comes pre-installed on Macs). It’s full of features, easy to use, and extremely light on the pocketbook. So it’s good to see there’s finally an alternative: WavePad by NCH Swift Sound. It’s also free and full of features including text-to-speech, voice activated recording, and batch processing to apply effects to multiple files at once (you have to pay for that last one, sorry). I’m using it now and it seems to do most of the things I want it to do, and most everything I use Audacity for. It doesn’t have access to the VST effects that I use Adobe Audition for, and seems about as useful (not very) as Audacity for mixing together multiple audio files, but what can you expect for free these days? (Like an old professor used to tell me, there’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’, but then again he must not have known about free software.)

Talk about burying the best part of a story (yeah, it’s a company press release), but a recent press release by Cisco claims a study at the University of California-Berkeley reveals that incoming freshman think podcasting is just as important as both wireless Internet and email.  We’re still trying to confirm if students were directly asked to compare podcasting to these other technologies, but if it’s true it’s a big validation for podcasting in education and the podcasting industry in general.  We reported recently on the new UC Berkeley podcast channel on You Tube, and this new (alleged) study explains why this university decided to lead the charge in spreading its educational podcasts far and wide.

Apple is releasing their new operating system, Leopard, with two podcasting applications built right in: Podcast Capture and Podcast Producer.  Podcast Capture helps you to get audio and video and screen captures from internal and external devices (creating your content), and Podcast Producer helps you mix, encode, and publish that content so that fans can get it on a variety of devices (distributing your content).   You can read more about it here.

Podcasters in the Boston area have long been marking their calendars for the second Podcamp conference in Boston (you can attend a Podcamp at various times and places around the world), and that week is finally here. But Podcamp is not just for podcasters; it’s an intimate get-together for anyone interested in new and social media. All skill levels are welcome. The speakers/presenters welcome plenty of contribution from the audience, so this isn’t a conference for sitting idly through overly long, overly boring sessions — you’ll get your chance to lend your own expertise and opinion should you attend.

(Registration has hit capacity already, unfortunately.  We’ll provide more info if we hear otherwise.)

Yes, it’s another do-everything program for creating and uploading your podcasts, and yes, at first glance it looks like Garageband, the de-facto music creation program for the Mac that also supports podcast creation. But Ubercaster is making strides to separate itself from that pack (check the marketing speak here: “Leave your garage and feel at home”) as a program specifically built for podcasters. It’s got some neat tricks baked in such as live recording of interviews over Skype and iChat (which both have emerged as the de facto choices for recording interviews over the Web) and a “stealth mode” that allows you to mute certain programs while Ubercaster records the rest of the sounds coming through your computer. The obvious limitations/drawbacks are the price ($80) and the lack of a Windows version, but otherwise it looks like a good solution for a Mac podcaster who conducts interviews over the ‘Net.

Here’s a great story about a podcasting summer program for children of U.S. migrant workers in a suburb of Philadelphia, PA USA.   The Chester County Intermediate Unit Migrant Education Program gave pre-teen children Mac computers with built-in microphones and had the children record themselves talking about their prospective careers.  This exercise not only helped these children learn about technology, but helped them brush up on their English and learn about what it takes to go to school in the U.S.

From the Philadelphia Enquirer.

The brains behind one of the earliest popular video podcasts, Rocketboom, are trying out a new form of advertising courtesy of their new partners at Blip.tv, a free hosting company for video podcasters. If you watch Rocketboom on the Internet, you’ll now see an interactive ad (you click the ad and go to the sponsor’s site) at the bottom of the Rocketboom screen. If you don’t want to see the ad, you can X it out — kind of like the pop-up ads you see all over the Web.

Because you can “turn off” the ad, Rocketboom thinks this form of advertising is desirable to their viewers who like the sponsor and not intrusive to those who don’t. The first sponsor is Sarah Silverman of Comedy Central fame. Silverman is a bit of a polarizing choice to be the first sponsor, as some people love her comedy and others are genuinely offended by her or do not find her funny. The word isn’t out yet as to how Rocketboom will select sponsors for future shows, and that could very well be the difference in how fans of Rocketboom accept advertising on top of the formerly ad-free podcast.

WaveLab, a set of audio editing and mastering programs for both the PC and the Mac, now allows you to post podcasts to the Web using WaveLab Essentials 6. WaveLab E6 can be used on its own to edit, master, and post podcasts or can be used with music production programs such as Cubase or music creation programs such as Sequel.

E6 has podcasting features that will appeal to newcomers, according to the Steinberg website, but provides many of the bells and whistles that any podcast producer will enjoy, including resizing a photo for your podcast feed, creating templates so you can make new podcast episodes easily, and allowing video and PDFs as well as audio in your podcast feed.

All of us here have been Last.FM users for a while because it’s a great community service for recommending music. Recently we started noticing podcasts showing up in peoples’ charts on Last.FM, and it intrigued us enough to create a new Podcast.com profile. If you are a podcaster or if you have been listening to podcasts on Last.FM, give us a buzz through our profile and we can start listening to those/your podcasts.  Or if you’re neither of those and would just like to be our friend, drop us a message. Podcastic!