Podcastplayer.org news

I’m always on the lookout for MP3 player reviews, and I found a short one at Steve Holden’s Weblog: Audio Sample From iRiver MP3 Player & Sony Microphone.

Steve has an iRiver iFP-795 and a Sony ECM-MS907, and used them to record a short sample which he posts on his blog for comparison.

I’m interested in this recording setup. I don’t have an iRiver, but another (apparently equivalent) one which also has a line-in socket. Mine records great when I feed it from a little mixer with a mic preamp, but I can’t seem to get anything sensible if I just plug one of my various mics direct to the line-in.

So, can anyone clear up whether the ECM-MS907 mic produces a line-level signal, or the iFP-795 contains a preamp to record mic level? The descriptions at Amazon don’t seem to indicate either of these cases, so I’m somewhat puzzled.

My MP3 recorder does have abuilt-in mic, but its very small, and very omnidirectional, so it picks up a lot of room noise. I’d love to be able to just plug in a reasonable handheld cardioid or lavalier mic for interviews and stuff.

I tried to post this a few days ago, but it seems to have never made it through. Sigh.

It seems that James Corbett and Liam Burke are trying to work out a way of using podcasting as a kind of dating service. That’s wacky enough to be worth mentioning, but the thing that really caught my eye is the idea of using GMail, with its much touted “gigabyte of storage for every user", as a way to store and distribute podcasts.

Purists will argue that submitting audio files to a GMail account can’t really be labelled ‘podcasting’ since there is no way of automatically downloading the email attachments via RRS enclosure or syncing with your MP3 player, but I still think its a valid and interesting experiment.

That may be the case now but I’m guessing it can’t be that hard to write something that “scrapes” a gmail account and generates a RSS feed with enclosures pointing at the actual emails.

Of course it would mean that even your podcasts get swallowed up into the ravenous and ever-growing Google monster.

Read more at EirePreneur: Podating? and Liam Burke’s Podhost Gmail account

Podcast hosting seems like a growth area right now. I just noticed (via Podcasting News) a new offering from podlot.com - cheap parking for your podcast.

At first glance, their prices look reasonable: starting at $4/month for 150MB storage and “unlimited” bandwidth. However, it’s really easy to fill up 150MB if you podcast at all often, and that means you’d soon be looking at tough decisions about which ‘casts to leave on the site and which to take down, or whether to pay more per month for more storage.

By the time you get to a more reasonable 1GB of storage, you’re up to $20/month. And you can get some much better deals on regular hosting for that sort of outlay.

As well as a podcast fan, I’m also a software developer, with a particular interest in the Java programming language and platform. So I was delighted to find that there is active development of podcast software in my favourite language.

jPodder is an ambitious project which hopes to be not just a podcatcher in the vein of iPodder and Doppler, but also a player and media manager, and even a podcast creation tool with MP3 and ID3 editing, RSS creation and upload facilities.

It’s not quite reached a “1.0″ release, but it’s well worth a look. Checkout jPodder Podcasting.

They have a development blog, although they seem to have recently reorganized things, so the links in the RSS (at bloglines, at least) are shot.

If you are a regular visitor you have probably noticed that I’ve not posted anything for the last few days. I’ve been having all sorts of strange network and system problems, and posting to this blog never seemed to reach the top of the “Todo” list. Somehow, backing up my PC in case it’s all about to go “pear shaped", seemed a better choice. :)

Things seem to have settled down a bit, now, though. So I’ll try and add a bit more content today.

Sorry.