Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Podcaster software by KudlianSoft

Podcaster software by KudlianSoft

Published by Wesley Fryer in apple, podcasting on September 29th, 2005

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Podcaster software by KudlianSoft is software for Macinotsh OS 10.4 allowing both young and old students to publish and enhance podcasts. It is available now as a pre-release download. From my cursory review, it appears you want to author your podcast file either with Garageband or Audacity (or iMovie) and then import the file into Podcaster.

Podcaster facilitates creation of enhanced podcasts using Apple’s free “Chapter Tool” software, which you cann download with one click from within the software. The “About Chapter Tool” read-me file from Apple sounds a bit scary, leading with the statement “Chapter Tool is a command-line application that is launched from within Terminal.” Thankfully, it appears Podcaster takes the scary parts out of this process.

One way to create an enhanced podcast using “Podcaster” is to use an exported movie file, and choose FILE – INSERT FILE FOR ENHANCED PODCAST. Then you can choose to copy a frame from the movie for each chapter marker for the podcast that you want to insert. Alternatively, you can drag images into an image area for each chapter marker. Each image can be assigned a web link, including a title and URL. When the enhanced podcast is played within iTunes (the only application capable of playing them currently, as far as I know) the chapter marker images are shown in the lower left corner, along with the web link titles and weblinks. Handy if you are listening to the podcast through iTunes.

I would wager a fairly large sum that in the near term, iPods are going to be able to display these images and weblinks that iTunes now supports. Full motion video is coming to the iPod also, I would bet, though this is purely educated conjecture on my part– not some kind of insider’s knowledge.

I may take Podcaster for a spin with an instructional video I created earlier in the month, and post it as a podcast soon. Because the RSS standard still just supports a single file enclosure (as far as I know) I think I’ll have to publish that podcast twice: once as a “normal” mp3 file anyone can play and listen to, and secondly as an enhanced podcast optimized exclusively for iTunes with chapter markers.

The company, KudlianSoft, also has a variety of other products. Notable among them is “Charting and Graphing for iLife,” which “allows students to produce charts that are drawn directly into a clip as an iMovie effect,” among other things. Very cool and practical.