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iTunes 4.9 To Support Podcasting
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon May 23, 2005 09:05 AM
from the well-of-course-it-will dept.
from the well-of-course-it-will dept.
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.
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podcasting, bah! (Score:3, Interesting)
Reality Check (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
(You've got to love the nutral point of view of Slashdot articles.)
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All about timeshifting (Score:4, Interesting)
I totally agree. I can listen to the Democracy Now! Podcast [democracynow.org] 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! [democracynow.org] 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.
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Re:Reality Check (Score:3, Interesting)
Just put up with it for 6 more months and all the hype will die down. If it doesn't, then just make sure your own podcasts are abou
Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Funny)
The guy made a million dollars!
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Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Insightful)
You just don't get it. Podcasting isn't about blogging with audio, or time shifting radio programs. Its about distributing radio programs. If you think of Tivo as a hack that creates an on-demand system out of a streaming media, podcasting is the on-demand system that Tivo wanted to be. It's just a new buzz word for audio on demand. It is overhyped, but it isn't a fad. One day, this is how we'll watch the news on TV.
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Re:Reality Check (Score:5, Informative)
IT Conversations [itconversations.com] (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 [publicradiofan.com] 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.
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Re:Reality Check (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.cartalk.com/Radio/Show/ [cartalk.com]
Car Talk is available through podcast.. Fad?
Re:Reality Check (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Reality Check (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:podCast for Lauguage Learning (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [annikrubens.de]
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.
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Re:Another person doesn't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
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! ??
Maybe not. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Four Apple Articles in a Row? (Score:3, Funny)
Podcasting info (Score:3, Informative)
It's an enabler... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure beats the dross on airwaves... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Why I like PodCasting (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
podcasting as timeshifting (Score:5, Interesting)
I get most of my new music by listening to KCRW (http://www.kcrw.org/online/ [kcrw.org]). 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.
Re:podcasting as timeshifting (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.kcrw.com/podcast/ [kcrw.com]
m.
Re:podcasting as timeshifting (Score:3, Informative)
Wayne's World for radio... (Score:4, Funny)
Wayne's World, Perhaps, But.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Wayne's World, Perhaps, But.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Say you run an independent radio station. College, community, what have you.
You have a programming schedule and a good many interesting programs. For example the Atlanta local WRFG [wrfg.org] is a 50KW FM stereo community supported radio station that would be of interest to a much larger audience than local Atlanta.
If WRFG were to make programs available as archives kept for a week and updated live and also make these archives easily available over 'podcast' they wou
Nice... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Learned his lesson? (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Wayne's World? (Score:3, Funny)
I don't get it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [thesync.com] 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?
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [blogspot.com] 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
It's changed the way I use my iPod, Steve. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
changes (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Sorting the wheat from the chaff (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Video store. They've already got all the front-end functionality built into iTunes 4, so ...
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Brain storm! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:well.. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Supporting DRM'ed WMA files would hurt their store. Supporting Ogg Vorbis would do nothing of the sort.
Re:well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Ap
Re:well.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 tog
Re:Wish it read "iTunes to use open formats" (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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NEWSFLASH (Score:3, Insightful)
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 jo
Not very hard... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:That's all well and goo, but . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Right click on song, click on "Play Next in Party Shuffle"
There you go.
Re:Kinda stupid Ipod/Itunes question (Score:3, Interesting)
* 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 [winamp.com].
* 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 ne
re: Is Hemos the new Michael? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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