Intro to Podcasting Great Lakes Broadcasting Conference 14 March 2006

Harold Beer - WKAR Great Lakes Broadcasting Conference 14 March 2006

Podcast a portmanteau coined from iPod and broadcasting in 2004 New Oxford American Dictionary - word of the year 2005 Defined: a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player

got content?

Elements of a podcast Metadata – information about information ID3 tags – best-known ‘standard’ Song title, artist, album, and so on; But what about radio programs, or news features? Audio file Usually mp3, but could be Windows Media, Ogg- Vorbis – precluded by convention and the embedded base of mp3 players RSS – Really Simple Syndication Not just for audio Uses XML

Elements of a podcast XML eXtensible Markup Language simultaneously human- and machine-readable format, easily constructed humanmachine-readable Subscription Not like a print subscription, but an instruction to check to see if new content is available and download it, if it is

WKAR – podcast implementation June 2005 Anger can be positive

Deconstructing NPR We can get together next week, but we'll need Harold in on it. He's not in 'til Monday, so we can't set a date yet. For discussion: The podcasts indexed by The NPR/PRI/APM demonstration project (our page follow a format with these elements: Music tag/theme "This is..." program name and description sponsor support message Program as aired thanks for listening mssg sponsor/support message music tag/theme except the GLRC podcasts do not have a sponsor message item 1/7 is the same for all podcasts in this group, whether they are from PRI, NPR, GLRC, etc.

Automated capture Regular, recurring events must be automated Shell scripts and cron (one minute granularity) Upcut problem: takes a while to start up mp3 encoder Solved by: starting a minute early and sleeping for 58 seconds until starting the capture would happen at exactly the correct time. ID3 tags Title – Episode Title or summary of content Artist – Producer/Host and copyright holder Album – Title of Series or show name

Automated capture ID3 Tags Just like MPS: HD Radio Tag metadata drawn from mySQL database using PHP script, utilizing the same data we use for our streaming file archives.

Automated packaging - mp3cat 1.audio ‘signature’ 2.title announcement 3.funding credit 4.program 5.thank you for listening 6.funding credit 7.audio ‘signature’

Automated RSS file creation Metadata - using PHP, draw from mySQL database, and create RSS file. RSS file is key - provides metadata to feed readers (iTunes, Juice, et al)

Are you being served? Podcasts are a download, usually from a web (http) server. RSS files are XML files and can be delivered by the same server. 550 MHz Celeron, 192 MB RAM, 250 GB HD LAME process only uses 37% of processor to encode kbps mp3’s concatenation and tagging can use all of the processor, but can play nice if needed can saturate 100Mbps Ethernet

Content possibilities Locally produced programs to which we hold the copyrights (e.g. Off The Record, Quizbusters) Educational purposes - IVS supports classroom activities, ancillary information

What does it look like?

More information This presentation at:

More information Useful tools - lame - mp3 encoder perl - scripting language PHP - scripting language mp3cat - mp3 concatenator mySQL - database Useful websites: feedvalidator.com - RSS validation id3.org - id3 tag HQ blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss - rss spec. page Special thanks to Bill Richards, WKAR Webmaster