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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
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.
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!!!
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. --
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)
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.
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
"iTunes to Drop DRM"
In related news, the entire music industry has dropped support for Apple's iTunes Music Store and is suing Apple for breach of contract, loss of revenue and numerous copyright violations.
Consumers wishing refunds on their now almost useless iPods were advised by Apple store and helpline staff "Shit no! We need every cent for the court battles now! If we win, you'll get you music back, but until then we need to push this case through and put the business on the line because it's a principle dear to a few hundred geeks on Slashdot!"
The popular Slashdot website commented cryptically today "Less space than a Nomad. No FM. Lame." A few posters on the website criticised Apple for not going far enough.
One poster commented: "They should storm the citadel of the star-star-AA. Maybe with leet swords of righteousness plus seventeen, you know, for EverQuest, or maybe with those cool guns you get on Halo-2, but not the original Halo because that was just crap. The ending was better though, so YMMV. That'd be so cool, and then they'd be teh godz. I still wouldn't buy their shit though. It's not free enough for me."
Business Analysts changed the rating of Apple's stock from "buy" to "get the hell out of there! Just run and don't look back for the love of God!" This move is expected to cause Apple stock to suffer.
Darl McBride, CEO of the foundering SCO corporation has offered to step in to Apple's CEO role and bring the company back to health. "I believe that Apple can still make a case that Microsoft stole their UI, and by charging every Windows owner on Earth a simple, one-off $299 fee, we'll recoup those losses."
Noted software tycoon Bill Gates was unavailable for comment, as he was admitted to hospital suffering convulsions caused by fits of continuous hysterical laughter.
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).
There are other products which can support the iPod, depending on the OS you use. Not sure on the Mac but with regards Windows:
:) Link for that here.
* With the normal iPods, there are various freeware apps including a good plugin for Winamp that let you control / update the iPod. Link for that here.
* With the iPod shuffle, you can download a small freeware app which allows you to just drag and drop MP3 / AAC files onto the player and run the app to rebuild the database on it - nice and easy
So no real need for iTunes unless you want to buy / convert music.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
How exactly is podcasting different from Shoutcast?
Oh, you can download stuff and listen to it later. How exactly is that different from Shoutcast with Steramripper?
So now instead of listening to what the Evil Corporate Companies want you to hear, you can listen to some random ClearChannel viral advertising campaign. Congratulations.
Podcasting is to radio as blogging is to news. Pockets of people think it's the greatest thing ever, but the vast majority of people have common sense.
For more information, click here.
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.
I download the show at anytime, instead of having to have my PC on and running for the entire show's duration?
*forehead slap* duh! ??
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.
You don't have to buy your music through iTunes...I still buy and then rip my cds to mp3s. I only use iTunes to buy singles where I only want one song, and not an entire album...and since my car is geared to connect a iPod to the stereo, I am not all that worried about not being able to play it elsewhere. Same with the Xbox 360 and my home stereo.
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
"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
You mean "ITMS to use open formats". Every Podcast I've ever seen comes as a bog-standard unencrypted mp3.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Atom isn't supposed to push all RSS versions out of the market, it's supposed to be a powerful format as an alternative to (powerful usage of) RSS 1.0 and 2.0 but with most stuff already built-in into the default namespace. This is good for some people, makes it difficult to generate for some people (you have to provide three different timestamps for each entry, for example), but makes the job as the data format for the standardized Atom editing API much easier.
Any feed consuming program nowadays worth its name has got to support all pertinent RSS/Atom versions. I trust iTunes to not disappoint here - Apple just wrote a Syndication framework (for Tiger and Safari "RSS" 2.0) that's read any feed I've, uh, fed it, and from the get-go announced support for both Atom and "RSS" (although it's unclear which versions of RSS they claimed to support).
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
Anybody listening to a 20-year old math lecture on the subway deserves to have their white headphones and their lunch money swiped.
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!