Review: iPodcast Producer

iPodcast Producer is designed to help individuals create podcasts—personal radio broadcasts produced by citizen broadcasters. The podcast is pushed to listeners from a Web site in the same fashion blog content gets pushed to an RSS Reader. (See Podcasting: One Small Step for Technology, One Giant Leap for Personalized Audio) Listeners typically download the broadcast to a portable media player such as an Apple iPod (hence the name). iPodcast Producer should appeal to more technical users who have been frustrated trying to pull all the tools together themselves, but the program still needs some work to help less experienced users get started.

Be aware that in addition to the iPodcast Producer software, at a minimum, you will need a set of USB headphones with an attached microphone to use the program effectively.

Getting Started
When you first open the software, you are greeted with a confusing interface with no instruction on how to get started. The software should be better designed to get the new user oriented. To the developer’s credit, there is a wizard, which helps you select up to 12 pre-recorded tracks (for instance, if you always use the same opening) and other music and sound effects you may want to include in your podcast. You give each of these tracks a name and assign it to a button. The buttons appear at the bottom of the iPodcast Producer window where you simply click each one to trigger the sound while recording—a very convenient feature. But the developers should take this a step further and build the wizard to walk less experienced users through all of the program’s basic functionality.

Recording Your Podcast
The real purpose of this program is to record podcasts, and you can get started by putting on your headphones and clicking Record. The software divides the recording into music tracks and voice tracks automatically. You simply start talking into the microphone to record your voice. You can trigger the music/sound tracks you added with the wizard throughout the recording. In addition, you can fade in and out, adjust the volume and see how loudly your voice is recording in a graphical view of the sound channels. The interface is crowded, but the tools are fairly straightforward once you figure out what they are, especially if you have used any recording software.

After you record, you can access powerful editing tools with the click of a button. These tools are the strength of the software and help justify the cost. You can add a variety effects such as amplifying the volume, a feature I found useful when testing because my voice came out softer than I expected. Conversely, you can decrease volume in a background track if it’s drowning out your voice. The editing suite comes with an assortment of tools including ones to rip (to add tracks to the podcast) or burn tracks (to save tracks) to or from a CD, split files, reduce pops in records (if you are adding music or sound effects from a vinyl LP), and remove silence gaps from the track. I was able to use many of the editing tools within minutes, although to use them effectively will take some time if you have not worked with these types of tools before.

After you adjust the tracks just the way you want them, you can save them as .wav files for use as part of another podcast, or save the files as a podcast, where you are prompted to upload the files to your Web site to make it available for your listeners. The program includes a simple FTP utility so you can upload files and ensure that all the proper files are included.

iPodcast Producer is still a bit rough around the edges, but the pieces are all there. All it needs is some tweaks to the interface and some more help for less technical users. Ultimately, it pulls all the tools you need to produce, edit, and broadcast a podcast in a single package, and that should make users interested in podcasting take notice.

iPodcast Producer
Introductory Price: $149.95
Regular Price: $249.95
Industrial Audio Software
www.industrialaudiosoftware.com