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iTunes 4.9 To Support Podcasting
WaRrK writes "O'Reilly Radar are reporting that in a demo at D: All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs showed off iTunes 4.9, which has support for iPodder like functionality. Although, he was "slightly" dismissive of the phenomena, describing it as "Wayne's World for radio". Also, whilst currently only supporting free content, they are not ruling out paid for podcasting in the future. iTunes 4.9 should be available within 60 days." Yeah, Steve's kinda right on this - podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone.
I want DAB in the iPod
They've got a brand new major number, they don't really need new features.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Yeah, Steve's kinda right on this - podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change out lives is a wee bit overdone.
Finally, somebody with a little common sense! Honestly, how many people out there actually use the internet to listen to people's podcasts? I surely don't. It's faster to skim through articles in a blog than to listen to some amateur whine about how he thinks Walmart is the ultimate evil in the world.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
the breathy overstatement of how it will change out lives is a wee bit overdone
Sure. They said the same thing about the common users being able to create their own web sites. Yeah, there's a lot of noise, but the few quality content providers more than make up for it.
Is that some sort of record, Slashdot editors?
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
Wikipedia article here
It's the battle of the minds, and everyone's unarmed.
Yet another reason why iTunes is great and all, but I dislike it immensely as a player.
<3 Foobar (at work) and XMMS (at home).
Given that Rush Limbaugh (love him or loathe him) is going to be making his broadcast available via podcast, you could change iTunes to allow downloading DRMed podcasts on a pay-per-download or a subscription basis either through the iTunes store or a third-party source.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Sure Podcasting may not 'change the world', but after sampling shows for a few weeks I've come up with three or four regulars that beat the pants off any of the drivel that I can find on the airwaves. These shows keep me eagerly waiting for new installments every day.
The 'long tail' of shows almost ensures that there is something out there of interest to everyone. And if I wasn't rushing out to buy an mp3 player before, I sure am looking forward to getting one now so I can fill my hour and a half commute each day by programming my own 'radio station'... commercial-free and chock full of content that totally appeals to me.
Video store. They've already got all the front-end functionality built into iTunes 4, so ...
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Brain storm.
...aaaand that's where I ran out of creativity for today. Thanks very much buddy. Now I have to work rest of the day without doing anything creative! ;)
Movies (not just videos).
Lyrics for songs.
Karaoke.
Mixing (be your own DJ with pitch control and sound effects).
Support for independent vendors (a band could bypass the labels and list their content directly on iTunes). It could be possible for any band to list their songs on iTunes at a price they choose. And it could be done from the iTunes client. It really doesn't have to be very complicated.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Change out lives?
I'm more worried about changing out the batteries.
Bureaucracy loves company.
When I see a headline that reads "iTunes to use a DRM free, open format" then maybe I'll give half a sh*t :P
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Yep. This is huge. Or at least, I think so.
/. post to clue readers in ?
The only trouble is that I have NO idea what podcasting is. Reading the article didn''t clued me in. Googling got me to: http://www.podcast.net/, a very interesting web site, that does its best to NOT clue people in about podcasting. Of course wikipedia will tell me, but, hell, how difficult is it to put a single line in the
Podcasting makes my life easier. I listen to quite few shows, and like other geeks, the way my work hours are soemtimes I completely forget what day it is. I often used to miss a show for a few days before realzing "Hey, it's Friday, OTH came out a few days ago" Podcasting is good because it automagically updates my iPod when the new shows come out.
Although Steve is right in the fact that, for the most part, it's the "Wayne's World" of radio. There are some good shows out there and I do enjoy listening to them.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Ogg Vorbis support for the three people on the planet who use it.
but the breathy overstatement of how it will change out lives is a wee bit overdone./i.
.. in fact, i hardly pay much attention to "Big Media" and all their benevolent sponsors, at all, any more .. they're not making money off my time, which is being spent listening to and enjoying/paying-for content that has been made by people who are much, much, much closer to me and my mores, as a fan, than "Clear Channel" arer ...
..
i dunno, since the personal broadcast media revolution came along, i no longer feed off the general concencus being mass-produed for the hive-mind by "Big Media"
laders like jobs ridiculing this movement through generalities and slures really only shows that yes, in fact, putting mass-media broadcast tools in the hands of The People, instead of it being the exclusive domain of the vested interest/vaulted few, is a good thing
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Oh yeah, a few hours ago on engadget.com, along with the previous story about Apple and Intel. Looks like the submitter is just reposting headlines from other sites.
A rewrite to fix the numerous little annoying bugs that were introduced in versions after 2.0. Things like lag on 500mhz G3s when playing music and renaming tags, or sporadic pauses, dumping the clumsy parts of the old interface - just making the same old app work how they should have.
Apple seem to be pushing ahead so quickly (and well I might add) in advancing really useful features, that sometimes the old small bugs just get forgotten, and it's only when they've accumulated over several versions that together they make an app annoying.
(cue comments on the Finder now too)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV_tutori al
I get most of my new music by listening to KCRW (http://www.kcrw.org/online/). Since they are on the west coast and I'm on the east coast, a lot of their music shows are at inconvenient times for me. So, I wrote a little program that downloads the shows I like (they broadcast in MP3 format), and then I can copy them to my mp3 player and listen to the show whenever and wherever I like. This has allowed me to go from listening to KCRW only occasionally to catching every single one of my favorite programs.
I read Usenet for the articles.
Ogg Vorbis support for the three people on the planet who use it. A lot of released games use ogg vorbis, e.g. FarCry, SWAT 4. So that's a hell of a lot more than 3 people.
Steve has just never gotten over the Video Toaster being for the Amiga and not the Mac.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
It's only a matter of time before paid providers will see the value of this. Vidcasts (not podcasts) might be the killer app, but the media distribution has to begin somewhere :).
www.lonseidman.com
Quirks and Quarks is excellent as is Northern Lights and Dispatches and Ideas and tons of other shows that are directed at an above average IQ listener. They are federally funded and unencumbered by the requirement to "have the numbers" and don't have to stoop to the lowest common denominator.
BBC is often hailed as the pinnacle of independent jounralism but I find their broadcasts have a very condescending patronizing bias when they report from "lesser" places such as Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa. Somehow, CBC manages to bring lots of news from all over the world while avoiding that annoying condescending tone that permeates the Beeb.
You can listen to CBC live. The links are on their website.
As is the ABC.
If I got an ipod, would I need to use ITunes? Or can you simply plug in the ipod, and it works basically as another drive?
Thanks!
You mean copy music from the iPod to a computer? Not gonna happen for many many reasons. Don't Steal Music, remember?
How did new music get to your drive without a) ripping from CD or b) buying from the iTunes store? Limewire, you say? Hmmm. Or did you stea^H^H^H^Hcopy it directly off someone else's disk?
Party shuffle is the best enqueuer I've seen, do you know of a better one?
People have been distributing mp3 files online for a looong time now, and just because there's a new client for downloading them into a relatively new type of player (hardware instead of the player in your computer) is not as revolutionary as all that.
I know this isn't the rail-against-podcasting thread, but I feel like so many people are buying into the hype. This process is basically giving a brand name to the creation of mp3 files.
I've subscribed to tons of feeds from different people, and the signal to noise ratio is about what you'd expect on most irc channels. People reading headlines from other sites, not offering anything new, being generally annoying and all that.
It's like reality radio for losers, but there are some great feeds, as was mentioned before (IT convo is #1 IMO).
Ok back to listening to DSC.
(Sorry for poisting anon, won't let me login.)
I am going to switch in a few weekends. I just want that Rio Karma!
/login.pl not work for me (503 Service Unavailable), but this post-comment-and-login thingy work?
Why does
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This is a tech site, BY nerds FOR nerds. If you say that nerds should have a "neutral" point of view on a tech issue, then you're living in fantasyland. All nerds have a point of view, and the editors do too. This is a way that they can express that. We don't have to take what they say as the gospel truth. This is a discussion, not an effort to set the truth down in stone.
If you want journalism, go to nytimes or something (although it's rather hard to find good journalism _anywhere_ these days).
Now this is why I read Slashdot - where else can you get such a diverse range of people, and pick up wonderful little tidbits like the true story behind that wonderful legend about solving unsolved problems? Sure, it's available on Snopes for you to find if you know what you're looking for, but asking the right question is often a lot harder than the answer, as best illustrated bythe Hitch Hiker's guide: Meaning of life=42, Question=???. (Hey, perhaps if they'd put that up on the board, he might have been able to solve that as well!)
It also wants me to metamoderate, but I get a 503 for /metamod.pl as well. :(
☠
What?!?
New music got to my hard drive via:-
1. As you say, ripping from a CD from my collection (but not using iTunes, its ripper is quite poor).
2. By using another legitimate music store i.e. Napster/Yahoo/etc.
3. By myself or a friend actually making some tracks
4. By downloading some perfectly legally free music tracks
And party shuffle, a decent enqueue system? Seriously?
The only thing I would call that heap of shit is a mess of a random playlist, NOT in any way, shape or form a vaguely useable enqueue system.
It's a well known fact that intelligence is inversely proportional to common sence.
Podcasting is about listening to "free" (as in beer) radio content without being restrained by the 50-200 mile limit of AM & FM radio.
I live in Fresno, CA. I listen to a metal radio show from an FM radio station in Cleveland. I listen to an electronic/downtempo/ambient show from an FM radio station in Sydney, Australia. I listen to a 5-minute tech mini-show on American Public Media that, even if I knew where it was broadcast on my radio spectrum, how likely would I be to regularly "hit" the 5 minute show if I'm not going to listen to the rest of what the station plays? I listen to Leo Laporte's radio show from Los Angeles (which, despite the fact that I'm half a thumbnail away from LA on a world map, I can not receive the broadcast through normal radio means).
I have a SIRIUS radio in my car, but the breadth of content that I can get from podcasts completely dwarfs SIRIUS's offerings. Which isn't a slag on SIRIUS - it just can't hope to compete with the range of niche content that the Internet allows.
Podcasting didn't invent Internet radio, but it is in the process of perfecting it. I am listening to content that was not available to me through convenient means before. Shows that are broadcast beyond my tiny slice of the world are now being put online, letting me choose from stuff totally unavailable to me before. Other shows that existed online but were usually available at scheduled times in a stream are now more often being offered in podcasts for listening to on my time, not theirs. Since I can't get streaming radio in my car, some of these streaming stations put together weekly podcast versions of their content.
It's amazing how many people simply aren't getting it when it comes to podcasting.
For years, I had confused the parable of the prodigal student with that of David Huffman (of the ubiquitous huffman code). But the story is very similar. He said that he never felt famous until he saw his code spelled with a small 'h'.
Nothing wrong about it, as long as they give proper credit to the original authors.
Why not give people another option? Why not support an established, open, royalty-free format? (And why should I have to re-rip all my CDs to either an inferior format (mp3) or a proprietary one (AAC))
I realize that decoding Ogg Vorbis takes a bit more horsepower than mp3, but current iPods should be more than capable. The development costs would be a one-time expense.The only arguement I've ever seen is that few people use it. Well, Apple doesn't exactly have a history of ignoring the minority. The iPod was originally Mac only, after all.
Redundancy is good And also good.
You mean GPL'd software in closed source products. Open source = many licenses (including LGPL, MIT and BSD which can be used in closed source products.)
I'm sure I'll take heat for admitting this on Slashdot, but I'm a fiscally conservative voter who listens to Rush Limbaugh because I tend to agree with him on those matters. Don't agree a thing with the right's social agenda, but couldn't agree more when it comes to conservative ideas on fiscal policy and limited government. No lectures on the shortcomings of the current Republicans, most of them are RINO's (Republican In Name Only) when it comes to fiscal policy and the idea of limited government. Anyway, Rush announced recently that in early June he'll make podcasts of his program available to subscribers. Love him, or hate him, he is the biggest name in talk radio and when he does something, others are sure to follow suite.
On a similar note, I'm also a Tom Leykis fan, and since I live in a suburb of Detroit (and the only radio station that carried him moved the broadcast time to 3 am), I use replay radio to record a stream of a station in Seattle that carries him live in the afternoons. I think this whole pod casting thing is here to stay. There are a boat load of great radio programs out there that for one reason or another, I'd like to listen to all or part of but can't always do so.
For the n-th time, what would Apple have to gain? Who would buy a Mac when they could buy a Dell. Does anyone seriously believe Microsoft would release Office for Mac OS X for Intel?
The Mac would die the day the CPU would be the same as in a generic PC. Not from a architectural standpoint, I think they could make it happen, but marketingwise.
The thing that sets Apple apart from all other companies in this area is that they aren't just a hardware company or a software company. They are both. Most people buy the hardware because of the excellent software they offer on top. It's the combined experience that makes their hardware stand above the rest.
Although, he was "slightly" dismissive of the phenomena, describing it as "Wayne's World for radio".
/just sayin
This reminds me of those sentences from grade-school, where you had to circle all the problems with the sentence and rewrite it so it made sense.
Why not give people another option? Why not support an established, open, royalty-free format?
It doesn't send revenue towards iTunes' DRMd store.
Much as I'd love to see ogg on an iPod, Apple is acting it it's own shortsighted, greedy self-interest here.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
"Yeah, Steve's kinda right on this - podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone."
Maybe Steve's just learned his lesson, since stating that the Segway would "transform human mobiliy" and we all know how that's turned out...
I totally agree. I tried out the itunes player on win2k and an athlon 2800 and it was sluggish as hell, plus double clicking on a song doesnt play it. Or if it does play it, it takes a 10 second delay before it plays, and half the times it just loads the itunes store in my face. It's a complete piece of garbage and is so bad i would think it came from ATI.
Personally, I think that party shuffle is a *fantastic* enque system. You just have to have all your music in the iTunes database already. After all, iTunes is a database, not just a player like Winamp or XMMS. If all you want is a player then yeah, you probably won't like iTunes. If you want a music database that lets you generate playlists based on database queries then iTunes is more your style.
- Podcast
might be a fad, since it's more "hip" than calling the file an archive, but I can't imagine the freedom to listen to a given radio show at a time of your choosing to be a fad.Then again I could be wrong. Has downloading music files gone lame yet?
So does that mean nerdy, podcasting geeks will get hot babes?
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Supporting DRM'ed WMA files would hurt their store. Supporting Ogg Vorbis would do nothing of the sort.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Indeed, when will it provide a decent enqueue system?
Right click on song, click on "Play Next in Party Shuffle"
There you go.
Okay, color me clueless on this one. What's the big deal about podcasting? As far as I can tell, it's just making audio files available via an RSS feed. Is that really so life-changing? Couldn't this have been done years ago without the RSS, just by listing the files as links on a web page or even by dropping them in an ftp directory somewhere? Heck, I even remember a little something put out back before the turn of the millenium, definitely predating the iPod and almost predating RSS. There's nothing new here, except the name and the tangential link to Apple via the iPod. So really, what's all the fuss about?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
1) Relative to the cost of a CD, its not worth the hassle. When you can purchase a whole cd for $5 less than in the shop, *THEN* you can say there has been a push forward in the music selling front.
2) They need to make payment *alot* easier; those who will adopt iTunes will be young kids, 15 years old, make it easier by allowing them to make payments into a virtual 'iTunes account' like would would pay bills via the internet using online banking.
3) What is it with companies like Apple, operating on the internet, and still acting like they can only sell to Americans. Please, you've got a global site, how about acting global by allowing *ANY* Tom, Dick, Harry or Mary to purchase their music off the iTunes store instead of expecting them to wait for the 'big roll out'.
Why would Steve Jobs want to drive free content via iTunes? I consumed tons 'o tunes when I first got my iPod and starting last October have downloaded free content like mad -- so much so that I don't have enough listen-able hours in a day for all the stuff on my little white hard drive device.
Here's the kicker and what Apple will have to wrestle with: my own 45 minute commute to work each way is often filled with IT Conversationsand other 'podcasts' every day and I hardly listen to my own music library anymore.
SUGGESTION TO APPLE: if Apple were to play it smart, they'd provider "podcaster guidelines" and how-to's that would do what they'd done with the UI (set the bar for quality and usability) as well as providing a way for podcasters to monetize their offerings. It could and would explode the users of Garageband and the Mac platform -- since most of the really great audio tools are there.
WILD CONJECTURE: Oh yeah...if all the rumors are true about the next step for Apple is with a video-centric platform, it would position them nicely for all the vloggers to use iMovie, Final Cut, etc., for creating great video content.
iTunes is a brilliant piece of software design. It's a manager of one's music which allows unrestricted burning of CDs in compilations of your choice. It prints out CD covers of the artwork of the compilation. It is multiplatform, easy to use and free.
You, my friend, are an imbecile.
"Yeah, Steve's kinda right on this - podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone."
/. crowd aren't too picky.)
Dear Slashdot Editor:
If I wanted your opinion, I'd read your blog. Or you could leave comments in the discussion that follows the article, and I could read it there.
Your job as an editor is not to use story submissions as a platform for your personal views. Your job is to evaluate a submission's potential interest to the community and then step aside.
(Making sure it's not a dupe and that it contains good grammar and spelling would be nice too, but we in the
As ever, Mr. Jobs is right on the money. But look at what he's doing rather than what he's saying. By providing RSS downloads into iTunes he massively raises the profile of what was previously a geek only market. If this feature is used, no doubt they'll introduce a market place on iTunes for people share and talk about the podcasts they like.
Podcasts are a mess right now. Even if you find a really good podcast there is no way to promote them short of word of mouth. This presents another problem, podcasts are too complicated. You can't email your buddy and mine, Joe Sixpack, a link to an RSS feed and expect them to know what to do with it. People struggle to wrap their heads around web pages, never mind RSS feeds and MP3 files.
Apple getting behind podcasts with iTunes offers this interesting technology its best hope of becoming useful - like the BBC looking at this as a way of dropping Real, infavour of freeplay
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
"inferior format (mp3)"
Yes, but Ogg Vorbis has the inferior *name*.
Between Ogg, Lame, Gimp, recursiev acronyms, and all the cutesy Linux distro appellations, it's no wonder a lot of folks can't take open source seriously.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Here's a change, Steve. I don't use iTunes anymore, which means you don't get any of my money anymore.
Forget for the moment about the quality of podcasts out there. It's no worse than the quality of your average blog was a few years back. It takes a little while for the good ones to distance themselves from the pack and define what quality really is all about in the first place. There will always be an audience for anybody that wants the soapbox, just like always. We just need to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Everybody will find their own favorites.
The power of podcasting comes from the same delivery mechanism that RSS brings us (it's the same thing, after all, with a different payload). "Here are some sources of regularly updated audio. Bring it to me to listen to at my leisure."
Not everybody wants to listen to music on their MP3 players. I find it boring, personally. Nor do I want to constantly go out and search for new sources of interesting audio files to listen to (a regularly asked slashdot question), or pay $35 for an audio book when I could buy the paperback for $7. Podcasting opens up the door for me to have an effectively infinite amount of new content dropped onto my ipod every day. Sure I won't like all of it. That's what skip buttons are for.
Content will come, I have no doubt of it. IT Conversations is already well on the way. I listen to every keynote of every technical conference throughout the year. Sure, I could manually go and get those as they are published, but why bother? Why not just have them automatically show up on my ipod for me?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Nice theory, but if that's true, why does the iPod support MP3
Apple did not create the digital audio player market, they entered it. A new digital audio player that doesn't play the massive existing base of MP3s would be deader than a three-week old kipper. I would have thought that was blindingly self-evident.
adding another format that no one uses is hardly going to hurt them
MP3s are the bait, iTunes is the hook. A migration from MP3 to ogg just doesn't fit into that business plan. In fact, it may work against it. Before iTunes, AAC was a format that hardly anyone used. Apple would love people to migrate from old, smelly, boring MP3s to new, shining DRM's AACs.
I'd buy an iPod instantly if it could play oggs, but I'm under no illusions that this will happen anytime soon.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
It's interesting to note that both versions 1.0 and 2.0 of RSS support enclosures (and thus podcasting) but lots of podcasting software out there now only handles RSS 2.0. Hopefully iTunes will not get embroiled in the 1.0 RDF Site Summary versus the 2.0 Really Simple Syndication battle...
Fans of the old TechTv show "The ScreenSavers" might want to check out Leo Laporte's podcasts. He makes his radio show available. He has also gotten together with some people from the old show and they do a podcast called This Week in Tech.
http://www.leoville.com/
http://thisweekintech.com/
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
In the grand scheme, yes, 95% of what will be podcast is drivel nobody would really want to listen to. But podcasting makes it pretty easy to routinely listen to the 5% that's worthwhile. Furthermore, you can have podcasting "stations" that aggregate the best of the content that's out there. Because everything is done with RSS, it's pretty easy to do this.
I see it as sort of a tivo'ing of audio content on the net. Rather than everything having to be done in real time, you can get content as it's developed, and listen to it when it's convenient for you. You don't have to pay attention to how often content is created, you'll just get it downloaded automagically.
I think the long term power of this is the possibility for episodic audio and video programming to be produced by relative amateurs. Yes, most of the content out there will be worthless, but it won't take a huge investment for the truly talented to get their ideas out there. Just combine an RSS feed with bittorrent, and you don't even need much bandwidth to do it.
The web made it possible for anybody that wanted to write to publish. Now this is making it possible for anybody who wants to sing, talk, etc, to publish. It also lays the ground work for anybody doing video to publish. It's not going to be a revolution, but more of a completion of the revolution that started about a decade ago.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Podcasting is a technology, just like radio and TV. What counts is the content that's being podcast.
Garbage in, garbage out.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Information wants to be free!
Ogg Vorbis support might be nice, since it's one of the better streaming formats available...
Listening tests:
HydrogenAudio - The Autov tweaks made it into the official releases. (1.1)
(I can't find anymore at the moment, feel free to add your codec tests. The tests done via HydrogenAudio are generally considered to be solid.
Thanks
Jan
Jan
I don't know about individuals' podcasts, but real radiostations are doing it too. It's the easiest way I know of to get time- and space-shifted radio shows.
I totally agree. I can listen to the Democracy Now! Podcast anytime I want. On the subway, in the car, whenever. That means I can catch up on the events of the day during otherwise wasted time. This is huge for me. I repeat: otherwise wasted time affords me the opportunity to become a more informed citizen.
Also, I visit a bunch of different new sites every day, and I find that the radio format is a much better way for me personally to take in information. I'm sure this is the same with many other people (but not all, of course). I get more out of listening to one Democracy Now! broadcast then I do reading a whole slew of print articles.
And just because most self-produced stuff is crap, doesn't mean it will all be. Someone will come up with a smart way to filter the crap out. Someone always does.
Furthermore, the arena is not just open to radio. Any kind of recorded audio--old lectures are also available. Say your favorite mathematician gave a famous lecture in 1986. Guess what? You can listen to it on the subway. Pretty damn cool if you ask me.
podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone.
"This 'worldwide web' is neat and all, but all the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone." -- Hemos, 1994
Hemos has no idea what kind of harbinger Podcasting may be.
What I see: if nothing else, it has the potential to completely route around the music establishment -- and make the first internet music stars.
AFAIC, those who dismiss Podcasting don't actually understand it yet.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
So, you're saying that you've turned off your humor detector today?
First of all, the only DRMed AACs are from the iTunes Music Store. The ones you rip yourself are as DRM free as MP3s.
Secondly, Apple wants people to use AACs because they sound better. People are going to rip their music as AACs (the default in iTunes) and it's going to sound better than music from P2P (almost all MP3s) and their non-iTunes-using friends. This is going to make them think "wow, maybe this Apple stuff really is better; I should tell all my friends" even if it's subconsciously, and then Apple wins.
Finally, what's so great about OGG anyway?
Help I'm a rock.
Torrent pod casting requires a more complex client, but eliminates the problem. Torrent is downloaded, then download of torrented (large media) file starts, distributing the download over the network. A torrent casting video podcast would be a thing of beauty, especially when paired up to a collaborative media metadata backend (ie dyn website). RSS torrents are already supported thru azureus, as is i2p anon transmission layer... tho configuring such a thing is tricky. There is much progression in the torrent space, all of which applies to subscribable torrents.
A dedicated app (perhaps even re-packaging the azureus libs, large tho they are) would be quite useful, reducing the tech barriers. Further use optimization would be nice (ie the 'copy and paste rss url' must go... replaced with click to subscribe or, a standard selection of rss's from rss'd list of rss's which can be managed in app).
Podcasts are interesting, but limited, don't rule out something based on the technology, tho, especially if made easier to use.
People want you to use OGGs because they sound better. People can rip their music as OGGs and it's going to sound better than music from P2P (almost all MP3s) and their non-open-source-using friends. This is going to make them think "wow, maybe this open source stuff really is better; I should tell all my friends" even if it's subconsciously, and then free software wins.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Interesting, and silly me, I have the Parallel Importing Legislation right in front of me, in regards to New Zealand. Oh, and silly me, I can import it without restriction.
Oh, and how am I part of that 'crowd' when in actual fact, I have no problems with Apples DRM policy - Apple have to protect the IP of these companies, or they can say good bye to their contract. Unlike *YOU*, I'm don't throw everyone in the same basket. May I suggest you pick up some comprehension skills before the next time you reply.
i enjoy podcasting every day.
learning a language is tricky, and berlitz tapes are boring.
downloading a three minute podcast each day is a great way
to learn or keep fresh on a language -- the one i've been
enjoying most is the way this podcaster from munchen
uses language -- the musicality of it.
annik rubens - schlafloss in munchen
what makes it so good for learning a language, is:
1) because it is largely speech oriented, you get more
dialogue to work with than regular radio which often uses
dialogue as a seguay between musical segments.
a three minute chunk is manageable for a daily thing.
2) unlike live radio, you can rewind, and catch words
and phrases that you missed.
3) it stays fresh unlike stale old language learning tapes.
podcasting really has opened up the language for me,
because it can be hard to find good local speakers, and
these are already encoded as mp3s so you can take it around
on an ipod.
in diese sinn...
roland.
Reading .. after 6,000 years .. still the fastest way to absorb information.
Podcasting sux.
Set Party Shuffle to display 0 upcoming songs, that way it won't create a list of random songs.
Drag stuff into it, or use the contextual menu (right-click or ctrl-click) to 'Add' or 'Play next' in it.
J
i don't know about you, but I like to keep a toothbrush with me at all times. It comes in handy after I finish up chowing ass on a fine lady.
It's about the time-shifting, not some guy narrating Warhammer games in his basement.
I wasnt to do what I do with my PVR, and listen to high quality radio on my time and terms.
"Sig free in '03!"
Yeah.. not like them "professional" types with excel, iWhatever, and the slew of NX XP NT MX FU G5 etc...
I'm out of mod points, so I'll just have to agree with it in post. It sounds silly to blame a name for something not being as successful... or not. Ogg Vorbis? Granted, mp3 and AAC don't sound glamourous, but they at least sound... I don't, know... serious?
My good looks paid for that pool, and my talent filled it with water.
AAC isn't proptietary at all. Check out the wiki page
AAC is more or less the audio part of MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, depending on the version you're using. Last I checked, MPEG-4 isn't any more proprietary than MP3.
The article submitter and Steve Jobs are wrong on this. Podcasting has changed society a lot more than say segways have. Steve Jobs is right on some things,completely wrong on others. For instance, the mac mini is not selling just because it's small, it's selling more from the fact that finally you can get an entry level mac at a more reasonable price. People would be buying just as many mini towers with a normal form factor at 500$ from Apple if they would just release one.
Personally, I think once someone has been a millionaire for 20 years or better they lose track of how much money a dollar is. Steve Jobs has that "no clue" syndrome, same as the hollywood movie guys and the record guys. "No clue" of what things cost because to those multi millionaires living in rich society surroundings on the left coast all the time most everything in the normal consumer appliance/do dad area is so cheap as to be indistinguishable from near free in their POV.
And the reason why podcasting is taking off is because people can actually create and share content, they aren't restricted to the blather the commercial entities spew forth-and it *really is* mostly blather.. Steve got no clue on sharing, hollywood got no clue on sharing, mainstream broadcasting is starting to get a clue but they will want to podcast 50% commercials like always.
Previously featured on Slashdot, I think. It's basically the old Screen Savers crowd. Very good stuff.
SIG: HUP
Go Neuros!
/me is not a shill.
Information on wikipedia can be found here
How about gapless playback (with an accompanying iPod firmware update). Steve Jobs said the people at Apple are all music lovers which is why they supposedly made iTunes/iPod and the music store so "great". I call bullshit. If any one of them was a music lover, they'd get rid of the fucking gaps in between tracks that disrupt many good albums. It's been a problem from day one, and it has to be easy to fix. I mean a freaking 20 year old CD player can play an album WITHOUT GAPS AND retaining the ability to skip among individual tracks. IT'S NOT THAT HARD, APPLE!!!
A lot of posts seem to be deriding podcasting as being purely the audio equivalent of a personal blog. While there are certainly plenty of such podcasts, there's plenty of professionally produced material (the BBC output is just one example), and enough high-quality amateur stuff to fill the average person's commute.
The problem is the same problem mp3.com had (and Creative Commons/etc. music still has) -- when you've got a massive morass of mixed quality media, how is the consumer supposed to know what to try out and what to skip? With text you can skim-read, and sort that way. With audio, the selective process is more time consuming and pretty much impractical.
iPodder.org has a directory which has exactly the same problem as mp3.com. PodcastAlley tries to solve this by collating votes, but this just ends up promoting an "elite" of mainstream content, which only helps the mainstream consumer.
I don't know how to solve this, but there there is some promise: Adam Curry's show contains a lot of promos for other shows, and that's a good way to hear about podcasts you may wish to try out. I guess that's the next best thing to word of mouth.
After all, how do you decide what TV shows to watch? Trailers, reviews in the media, and word-of-mouth, right?
AFAIK, not all the iPods have the processing power to decode Ogg.
How hard is it to write a process that looks for updates to the music collection on the hard drive?
How hard is it to drag your music onto the iTunes icon, or the window, or simply double-click it? iTunes is a file-backed database system; you are not supposed to muck with it's files manually. That may not work for your style of use, but then you don't want a database system and iTunes isn't for you.
Moreover, as others have suggested, iTunes will gracefully merge if you attempt to re-import the music folder. You could add a folder action to do just that for you. Or you could learn to drag your files into iTunes and not play with its database.
I'm not saying that iTunes is the end-all, be-all of music players. There are all sorts of things it could do better. Figuring out that you messed with it's database though, is not one of those things. I guess I should just be happy that you didn't ask for skins.
Try these Google searches:
.ogg files than mp3s?
ogg filetype:ogg - 316,000 results
mp3 filetype:mp3 - 247,000 results
wma filetype:wma - 54,200 results
m4a filetype:m4a - 16,600 results
wav filetype:wav - 8,660 results
mp4 filetype:mp4 - 6,200 results
I know Ogg Vorbis is popular and all, but more
But if you want to see how completely the public misunderstands just what the heck a podcast is check out Bill Gate's first podcast as an example. The MEDC site refers to it as a "Video Podcast", but on film they just call it a podcast, so if you are new to podcasting then this is what you are going to think a podcast is: a video broadcast via WMV. Obviously there's a slight problem here in that podcasts are audio enclosures via RSS and vlogs are video enclosures via RSS. One could argue that this is a simply an exercize in semantics, or one could argure that Bill & Co. are once again trying to embrace and extend a technology/term for their own purposes. But the main result is that the common guy isn't going to have a clue about any of this. He only knows what he is told.
So, IMO, iTunes adding podcast support is a really good thing. This will help solidify the meaning of the word "podcast" before more confusion sets in. (Of course, if Steve & Co. are also embracing and extending...)
I know that tech podcasts get covered here a lot. Maybe some of you might enjoy these music podcasts:
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
http://www.dailysonic.com/ well demonstrates the power of MP3-over-RSS aka "podcasting" to do what text-based weblogs don't.
if you want unslanted news, go to |.
Between Ogg, Lame, Gimp, recursiev acronyms, and all the cutesy Linux distro appellations, it's no wonder a lot of folks can't take open source seriously.
I agree 100%, had i named the format it would have been the Open Audio Format or oaf!
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Garth: I think I'm gonna hurl..
Wayne: Go ahead. If you hurl and she bolts, it was never meant to be. If you hurl and she stays, then it's true love...
AAC doesn't sound as good as mp3 to my ears, at least as long as the mp3 is done at alt-preset-standard or higher, by LAME. I stopped listening to the AAC (and mp3) files ripped by friends and family in iTunes because my LAME mp3s and my FLACs, and my OGGs sounded so much better.
How about complete re-development from the ground up using xCode2 and Cocoa? It is a dirty little secrert that the current version, something that would be very popular with the blind, is largely incompatible with VoiceOver. http://www.macvisionaries.com/
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
Just the sort of moniker to inspire confidence among the suits...
Anybody listening to a 20-year old math lecture on the subway deserves to have their white headphones and their lunch money swiped.
In english words he was saying that OGG Vorbis is widely used in games.
It sounds better than AAC.
6 million people listen to podcasts
:-)
And you can bet integration with iTunes will make this number explode.
Podcasting and the idea behind it is bigger than you think. It's a pretty evolutionary way to broadcast, be a radio show host, distribute cheaply and quickly news/gossip/whatever, and all in a cool way (iPod!).
It's also a market opportunity. You know, I'd like to subscribe to a Bright Eyes podcast. Whenever a new song is avail on iTunes, it automatically buys it, downloads, and it's there waiting for me when I wake up.
It's in its infancy still, but it IS a big deal. For those on the side of the road, you too will be driving soon.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
By linking to anti-slash, I'm assuming you're one of those slashdot haters that only comes here to complain about slashdot. Why not get a life? Are you being forced to visit slashdot?
Yeah, and there's this over-hyped craze called the World Wide Web, which is just a bunch of amateurs posting web pages about whatever crazy topic they feel like it. Give me a break...
I realize that decoding Ogg Vorbis takes a bit more horsepower than mp3, but current iPods should be more than capable.
What makes you so sure? People who develop Linux for iPod tried to implement Ogg Vorbis on iPod and they claim it is not possible, at least not in real time (but probably this is what you mean). You can boot Linux kernel on iPod, but if you try to use it to play OGGs you get - what they nicely describe - "about 80% of real time". If you can do it in 100%, please join their effort.
Perhaps Jobs does not like Podcasting because people who listen to Podcasts listen more to talk (e.g. Quirks and Quarks, IT Conversations) and less to music. Furthermore, a device focused on podcast listening requires very little memory (you delete them after listening) and a very simple user interface (you're usually selecting from just a few "channels"). A podcast-oriented chip might add a few dollars to the price of a cell phone and would be as utilitarian as an FM radio (probably dominated by science shows and right wing nutjobs) rather than sexy like an iPod. For podcasting to be interesting to Jobs they would have to find a way to work in music, DRM and ITMS, as some here have proposed.
Music broadcasts are great!
http://www.monkeyradio.org/
This guy totally got me into a genre, called Trip Hop.
24/7, man.
It rocks.
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
I particularly like the Feynman 6 easy pieces lecture series, Noam Chomsky, and especially Alan Watts. Are they podcasts? Not necessarily, but I get them off Acquisition (e.g., Limewire) and put them on my iPod.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Actually, just for the sake of completeness, it is a dependent clause and not actually a sentence at all.
You can start a sentence with "although," but it has to be something like the following:
'Although he was slightly dismissive of the phenomenon, he later recanted and said that podcasting was the greatest thing since the PowerMac G4 Cube.'
Alternatively, you can weld it onto the previous sentence, thus:
O'Reilly Radar are ['is', in the US] reporting that in a demo at [the] D: All Things Digital Conference, Steve Jobs showed off iTunes 4.9, which has support for iPodder[-]like functionality, [a]lthough he was slightly dismissive of the phenomen[on], describing it as "Wayne's World for radio".
Then it just becomes a run-on sentence.
Sometimes you just can't win.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.