Product Reviews

Podcasting is a new way to distribute audio and video over the internet. Listeners and viewers subscribe to a show using iTunes or other podcast-gathering software, and new episodes are downloaded to their PC as soon as they appear online. Creating your own podcast isn't hard - our feature, 'DIY Podcasting' (Shopper August 2006), showed how to do it with a small collection of free software. However, X-oom's Podcast Studio claims to be a simple, all-in-one application.

Various modules cover recording, ripping tracks from audio CD, audio editing, converting to MP3 and (irrelevantly) transferring to removable storage. We particularly like the way you can assign jingles, sound effects or even complete tracks to keys on the keyboard to trigger as you record your show. However, you'll need a sound card that can record several sources simultaneously (such as Creative's What U Hear option) to use this function. Those with other sound cards will have to use the Audio Editor to compile spoken word and music, which isn't as easy as it should be - the free Audacity editor is far more friendly and flexible.

Podcast Director is where you add your shows to your podcast feed and upload them to your web server. At first it seems straightforward,

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and we like the way you can edit MP3 files' ID3 tags as well as add names and descriptions to the podcast and individual episodes. However, the various options are likely to overwhelm inexperienced users. The program handles iTunes-specific tags awkwardly, which means that information about individual shows is lost when your podcast appears in iTunes. FTP transfers are reasonably straightforward if you already have some web space, but those without are merely directed to a website written in German. The software's Germanic origins are also revealed in the built-in podcast directory, which lists more than 100 German podcasts, but just two in English.

You need a pretty good knowledge of the technicalities of podcasting to use the software effectively, if at all. When testing our podcast, the software berated us for not having an .rss extension on our feed file, but it didn't instruct us to add one or add it automatically. We found the tangle of ID3, podcast and iTunes-specific tags unfathomable until we examined the raw code the software had generated, and even then the results were less than satisfactory. Meanwhile, although most instructions and background information are written in plain English, some sections are overly technical and others are still in German. There are also various non-critical but nevertheless disconcerting bugs: after the message "Podcast upload successfully completed" appears, the user is presented with two buttons labelled Yes and No. Elsewhere, we were repeatedly asked for information we had already provided, although saving the project fixed this. While the program is running, certain keyboard keys don't work in any other applications.

Podcast Studio is much better than the disastrous WebPodStudio (page 55) but it fails to make podcast creation a hassle-free experience.