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July 20, 2005

Podcasts
geekage, life, thing

Podcasts are quite interesting. They seem the ideal way to spend the trip to and from work, and a deliciously stable way to obtain such obscure (according to the local radio) genres of music as electronic and trance. Their large size is both a blessing and a curse to the 56ker. Without the necessity of streaming, it's possibly with a little patience to grab a podcast or a few and listen to them, while on the other hand any stream above a certain bitrate becomes practically unusable.

iTunes, although it provides a very nice interface, fails in delivering podcasts to 56kers. The downloads are unresumable, limiting your selection to that which you can download in one session, and to make matters worse the downloads have a tendency to time out after about 25% of the file has arrived. I just switched over to downloading the same podcasts with wget and it's worked great, not timing out once. I'll check iPodder out when I have the time to download it, and if it has any support for resuming downloads I imagine I'll become a quick devotee.

I've seen some complain that "Podcast" is just a new name for audio broadcasting over the web. It is, however, different, thanks to the new listening procedure. In addition to the automation that can make it convenient and the portability which can also be handy, podcasts bring to the table the ability to aggregate as many broadcasts as you want. Much as RSS itself makes it possible to keep track of many more news sites and blogs than could be easily done with mere webpages, podcasts make it easy to listen to as many broadcasts as you have the time to hear. In addition, thanks to the easy-to-use software which makes podcasts so nifty, more broadcasts are created than would be without this easy way to reach listeners. Sure, many of these broadcasts may be trash, but logic says that some percent of them will good listening.

Listening to my mp3 player on the commute, however, has one definite downside: it means that I don't get a daily dose of NPR, leaving me rather out of the loop as far as news goes.

And so I'm bearing through 1 hour and 20 minute downloads and eagerly awaiting the morrow, when I might try out some podcasts on my drive north. We can discuss the safety of listening to so called trance music while driving on the highway later.

Posted by Trevor Savage at July 20, 2005 8:51 PM

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