HW4

Create a podcast up to 5 minutes in length about whatever topic you like. This can be you and your partner discussing this week’s comic books, current events, whatever you like. You could even record you or your friend’s band rehearsing or previewing their latest hit. Its entirely up to you!

Once recorded, post your .mp3 and the appropriate RSS file up on your web server of choice. You’ll submit a link to your RSS file that we can all try subscribing to with our favorite RSS reader (eg. iTunes, Google Reader, whatever).

You should be able to try this yourself, so you’ll know if you’re RSS file is correct. Have this completed and posted as a comment here by Thursday, November 20th.

Audio and Podcasting Lectures

Here’s the audio lecture from Tuesday, material that will be covered on the second exam. The information below on podcasting, however, will not be required for the second exam.

To start making a podcast, you’ll need an audio recording/editing program. I recommend Audacity, an open-source program available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. There are some excellent tutorials on using Adacity here.

The problem with Audacity is that it cannot encode compressed audio “right out-of-the-box”. This is due to the mp3 encoder requiring a license, something that was not paid for by the authors of Audacity. They figured that you could probably obtain it elsewhere without too much hassle, so as long as you tell the program where to find it, all will be well. So here’s how to do that!

If you’re in Windows, I’ve found it rather simple to just download CDEX, which includes the LAME Encoder. If you don’t want to do that or are on a Mac, read these instructions to download and configure the mp3 encoder.

Now that all that fun is out of the way, you should be able to record your audio and compress it. This can then be posted on your web server and provided as a URL to all of your friends and family. Exciting, right? But what next? What if you want to make another episode and not have to continually send new announcements out each time? That leads us to…

Podcasting. Essentially, you’ll be taking those same URLs that you have when you’ve uploaded the mp3s and using them in some new-fangled XML file called an RSS feed. Here’s one of the most succinct RSS tutorials I have read, walking you step-by-step through creating your own RSS feed from scratch. This will be the file that, once uploaded to your server, you can give out to your friends and family, instructing them to place it in their iTunes or favorite RSS reader so they’ll automatically be informed when you post new content.

That’s pretty much it, though there are certainly a few things of which I skipped over the gory details. I’ll make one from scratch when next we have a proper lecture, so be sure not to miss that. Until then, start playing with this so that you’ll be ready with questions for after the exam.