Chris Owens

For the past month or so, I’ve been listening to lots and lots of “podcasts”, especially when travelling to and from University. Podcasts, put simply, are audio files that you subscribe to via a feed in iPodder based software. These audio files are then automatically added to the media player of your choice and then automatically uploaded to your MP3 player.

The MP3 player and media player isn’t supposed to be important at the moment, but most of the work is going into iPods and iTunes at the moment. Probably because Adam Curry laid the foundations with his original iPodder applescript.

What do I need?

First of all, you’ll need some iPodder software.

For Mac, iPodderX seems to be most popular, and for Windows there is the amazing iPodder.

Then you’ll need to grab some feeds.

• Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code
• Adam Curry’s & Dave Winer’s Trade Secrets Show
• Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles
• Dave Winer’s The Scripting News
• The Weekly Standards Audio Show

Then What?

Using your iPodder software, subscribe to any RSS 2.0 feed that has mp3 enclosures and if you’ve done everything correctly you’ll see new files downloading, and then new playlists being automatically created inside your media player. Once the download has completed you should see the PodCasts being automatically uploaded to your media player.

More Information

• iPodder.org
• PodCasts.org
• PodCaster.net
• PodCaster’s Groups
• Engadget’s Podcasting How To
• How to Podcast with Windows

Once the software matures and the number of feeds increases, Podcasting is going to be massive!

Edit: Corrected the feed URLs.