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.

Comments

Reality Check

[LegendOfLink]

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.

Re:Reality Check

[frantzdb]

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.

(You've got to love the nutral point of view of Slashdot articles.)

Re:Reality Check

[Jesse_132]

Just like blogs, there are gems. Plus existing programs work better as podcasts than broadcasts.

IT Conversations (Doug Kaye project), is a top notch Podcasting source. (ok, it was around before the rage about podcasting, but podcasting made it integrate with my life).

Public Radio Fan also has a list of many podcasts that were radio programs - enabling you to listen to your favorite programs on your own time.

I hope all of NPR's programs become available as podcasts as I enjoy listening but don't live on their schedule.

Re:Reality Check

[c]

Finally, somebody with a little common sense!

Yeah, and I'm still in shock. I mean, a Slashdot editor with common sense? Isn't that one of the signs of the Apocalypse?

c.

Re:Reality Check

[kitzilla]

The problem with podcasting is music licensing: if you put music on a recording and distribute it, you're liable for ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC royalties. And this is reasonable. The composers wrote the songs, joined the association, and deserve to be paid for their work.

Who has the infrastructure to account and pay for this sort of stuff? Professional broadcasters, mostly.

This assumes the music was written by an association composer. Perhaps you have some unsigned band that has granted you permission to use their material. You're clean.

Beyond music, there's spoken word. Performances have value, but many of the podcasts I've heard were more akin to written blogs than produced audio programming.

What Apple could do here, if they're so inclined, is to swing a podcast deal with their labels. Music purchased from the iTunes store would be licensed for personal use as it is now and non-commercial podcasting. If iTunes could be retooled to record voice-overs -- and it sounds if that may be coming -- you could build a podcast within iTunes and distribute it via Apple's music store. The podcasts would be playable through iTunes.

Apple's motivation in this is twofold: it would encourage podcasters to use Apple's platform and purchase their library through the Apple Store, and the podcast songs would be clickable. Listeners could buy whatever they like as they hear it.

It's a proprietary solution, but would finesse the licensing issue and make music podcasting more accessable.

Maybe not.

[broller]

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.

Sure beats the dross on airwaves...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:well..

[tbone1]

so what's left for itunes 5?

Video store. They've already got all the front-end functionality built into iTunes 4, so ...

podcasting as timeshifting

[ObjetDart]

While I agree it's not going to fundamentally change our lives, podcasting *has* fundamentally changed the way I listen to radio. By which I mean, it allows me to timeshift internet radio (there's basically no good FM radio where I live.)

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.

Wayne's World, Perhaps, But..

[Mean_Nishka]

The easier it gets to download podcasting content, the more likely people will actually listen to it. Including this functionality in iTunes will expand the audience and make it easier for average Joe computer user to sample of the content.

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 :).

Re:Wish it read "iTunes to use open formats"

[GaryPatterson]

"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.

Nice...

[AyeRoxor!]

Although, he was "slightly" dismissive of the phenomena, describing it as "Wayne's World for radio".

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.

/just sayin

Learned his lesson?

[code_chick]

"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...

Not very hard...

[lullabud]

How hard is it to write a process that looks for updates to the music collection on the hard drive?

It's not hard. All you have to do is drag your music folder onto iTunes and it'll merge. Try `open -a iTunes ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/ ` in a cron job. It'd be even easier with spotlight's mdfind. So, I guess the answer to your question is "not that hard."

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.

Re:well..

[StrawberryFrog]

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.

Re:I don't get it.

[wootest]

The big deal:

Programs using an RSS feed to get URLs to audio files, downloading those, and cooperating with your jukebox software or your music device directly to, as another commenter said, "make audio magically appear" on the device. This is a) convenient, so people like it and have a bigger chance of using it, b) chock full of 'hot' technologies (RSS, automated downloads, digital music), so tech columnists and managers like it, and c) enables a wider range of people to be broadcasted. It also works better now than it would have a few years back, since audio can be heavy to download, and more people have faster connections now.

It's automated, it's refined, it's buzzword-heavy for those who like that and people get it without a lot of explanation. Like a lot of technologies it's not new but brings the concept to a wider audience. I think it's overrated myself and not worthy of the label great, but I can appreciate that these things make it good.

re: Is Hemos the new Michael?

[Cid Highwind]

Dear poot_rootbeer:

Slashdot has been Hemos and Taco's "blog" since well before "blog" was ever considered a real word.

Real news sites don't publish readers commenary on the stories (or on which editors aren't doing their jobs).