Podcatching
The popularity of podcasting is amazing -- it's one of the fastest growing
computer applications. The original term "podcasting" referred to everything
about the process from recording radio shows, posting it on web sites, and
downloading and listening to it. Although podcasting still means all those
things, it's now more commonly used to refer to the broadcasting end of it.
“Podcatching” is that new term referring to the receiving end of podcasting.
Podcatching refers to finding podcasts, downloading them and transferring them
to your MP3 player. You can do this all of this manually by going to the
podcasts web site and downloading individual MP3 files, or the whole process can
be automated by using RSS feeds and synchronizing them to your MP3 player.
RSS is a format for syndicating content on web sites. Up until recently, it was
used mostly for sending out news to subscribers. It is not limited to text,
though; it can also be used for graphics, video, and audio. When you subscribe
to a podcast RSS feed, new podcasts will automatically download to your computer
when they are available.
There are several software packages for podcatching. They have everything you
need -- search engines for finding podcasts, RSS readers for subscribing to
feeds, and playlist generators which can be transferred to your MP3 player.
There is no need to transfer podcasts to an MP3 player. You can also listen to
them on your computer using any kind of audio software like Windows Media
Player. However, many people like to transfer podcasts to their MP3 player so
they can listen to them on the go.
People who have an Apple iPod MP3 player can use the iTunes software for
synchronizing podcasts to their iPod. Each time the iPod is plugged into the USB
port of the computer, new content is automatically downloaded to the player.
This type of synchronization is also available for other types of MP3 players.
Software is available which gives the same kind of convenient synchronization to
almost any type of MP3 player which can be recognized as a removable data device
by the computer.
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