Building an RSS podcast feed, Part 3

For the last couple of weeks I've been discussing how to create an RSS feed for a podcast. This week I'm going to discuss deployment, but first a friend who read last week's column asked me: "What software do you use for creating the actual podcast audio?"

Ah, yes — that's a biggie. There's a lot of audio software out there and each application has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, there's Audacity, a free cross platform, open source audio package which, while it is excellent in many ways, lacks user interface polish when compared with some of the commercial products. That said, Audacity is very sophisticated and powerful and once you're used to it, it does a great job.

I often use Audacity for stereo recording, but for multiple inputs and where you're not mixing the inputs down to stereo with a hardware mixer, you'll need much more sophisticated audio input hardware. The problem is that while Audacity is supposed to be able to record as many as 16 channels simultaneously, there's precious little documentation on how to do it. Moreover, users reported that in previous versions of Audacity (the current stable version is 1.2.6) multiple input channels were subject to noise and dropouts due to sampling problems.

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For the last couple of weeks I've been discussing how to create an RSS feed for a podcast. This week I'm going to discuss deployment, but first a friend who read last week's column asked me: "What software do you use for creating the actual podcast audio?"

Ah, yes — that's a biggie. There's a lot of audio software out there and each application has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, there's Audacity, a free cross platform, open source audio package which, while it is excellent in many ways, lacks user interface polish when compared with some of the commercial products. That said, Audacity is very sophisticated and powerful and once you're used to it, it does a great job.

I often use Audacity for stereo recording, but for multiple inputs and where you're not mixing the inputs down to stereo with a hardware mixer, you'll need much more sophisticated audio input hardware. The problem is that while Audacity is supposed to be able to record as many as 16 channels simultaneously, there's precious little documentation on how to do it. Moreover, users reported that in previous versions of Audacity (the current stable version is 1.2.6) multiple input channels were subject to noise and dropouts due to sampling problems.

I don't have space to get deeper into this topic but if you have to do multitrack recording direct to disk be prepared for a "spendy" experience for both the hardware and the software.

So, let's get back to creating an RSS feed for our podcast. An easy way to do this is with a program called ListGarden.

ListGarden, which is free (though donations are encouraged) and available for OS X (as a Perl script), Linux (also a Perl script) and Windows (as an executable, which is really a Perl script with a built-in Perl runtime), is published by the legendary Dan Bricklin. The program was last updated in 2005, but still does a fine job of creating news feeds.

ListGarden is implemented as a custom Web server that presents a tabbed browser-based interface. This interface provides access to the configuration options where you set up the location of a local copy of the feed's XML file and or the FTP details for uploading the file to a remote server. Other tabs let you set the feed's overall details and the details of individual feed items.

You specify the names, descriptions and locations for each feed item and ListGarden can optionally generate additional human readable HTML files that list and link to the feed items and their content. You can also provide templates to change the look of the generated HTML pages.

The ListGarden system works great and I award it 4 out of 5 (its lack of updates is a problem and it doesn't directly support the tags that must be included to promote a podcast via Apple's iTunes store).

A more up-to-date podcast generator is called (rather boringly) Podcast Generator. This program, written in PHP, is free and open source and is intended to be installed on the server that your podcasts will be hosted on.

The setup of Podcast Generator is simple once you've uploaded the installation files to your server and, like ListGarden, everything is done through a Web browser interface.