Podcasting is that thing I said I would do which I was never sure I’d get to. I have a whole list of such things; things I would do when (and if) I had the time. But then really when do I have the time ? An older (and much wiser) friend once told me that it is not that we don’t have the time for a particular activity, it is just that we do not love that activity enough to ever fit it into our schedule. Which is true. You truly never have the time for all the stuff you want to do, you just pick and chose between things you have to do, and stuff you want to, and hope that you strike some kind of workable balance.
Ideally I’d require a good 30+ hours in a day to do all the stuff I want to. But then you cherry pick, toss some over for the next day, and then at the very end of the day spend a disproportionate 4 hours reading that unput-down-able book into the wee hours of the morning, so that the next day you can roam around groggy eyed, with a fire burning at the back of the optic nerve.
It’s a pretty error-prone process – this cherry-picking. Some of the want-to-do stuff is pretty clear, like cuddling with the kids, now that they want to be cuddled with. There will be a time when they will not want to be babied so much, and it is getting closer. My son, already won’t let himself be kissed by Mom in public, and has second thoughts about holding my hand when outside the home.
So then, I figure I must like this blogging thing enough to sit around figuring out podcast hosts at 2am in the morning; it does pale in comparison, this winter especially, to the cosy comforts of a warm bed. And now that I’ve figured it out (with help from friends, and the Wonderful WWW) and plan to repeat the process atleast monthly, it’d behoove me to put down a Podcast 101. So here goes :
To podcast you need this :
1. An audio file, preferably an mp3
2. A host for your audio file
3. A podcast feed to submit to podcast directories
For starters to upload a podcast somewhere, you need to first create one. This is assuming you already have a goal/target audience you want to reach. For this I used Audacity, a fantastic audio build tool, simple to use and free to download. Ah, the beauty of open source ! Once the tracks are spliced up as you want them, and the mp3 is created, one hunted around for a host. There are free ones, and there are the non-free thingies. Unfortunately free is not easy. I know – I tried uploading to OurMedia, and gave up after a couple of tries, finally uploading to the Internet Archive. The other 2 free hosts that I’ve heard of are :
and there’s a whole lot of pure storage options on the net, like this, although I haven’t tried them.
That done, one must create a feed. Fairly easy to do in Blogger, and with a little help from FeedBurner, but doesn’t quite work in Google Feedreader. I’m still experimenting though, so would appreciate feedback and tips from those of you who have honed podcasting to a fine art.
Meanwhile here’s the final product :
http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf?0.9385646287352851
I do hope to have many of these in the coming months, and to have carefully tabbed pages listing out each and every one of my media (ad)ventures (here’s another). But it’ll probably take time; it’s on my list – yes, that list!
There is a plethora of information on both Audacity and Podcasting out there – here is a list of articles/videos and screencasts on this topic that I found especially useful :
– Youtube video on podcasting with Blogger
– A Podcasting tutorial
– A bunch of useful how-to screencasts for Audacity
– Feedburner help for podcasting
