How to listen to a Podcast
If the word "podcast" implies to you anything foreign, complicated and time-consuming, then read on.

Podcast: A series of media files (usually mp3s) that a subscribers' software automatically detects and downloads new episodes.

  1. You do not need an iPod. Or any other portable media player. They're fun and all for taking your podcasts wherever you go, but all you need is a computer and you can listen. If you really want to listen to it somewhere other than your computer, you can just burn the mp3 file onto a CD.
     
  2. Subscription is free. It's not like a magazine subscription, or a cable channel subscription, or like a drug prescription. It's free, you don't have to pay for it.
     
  3. Subscribing is easy, and there's lots of ways to do it. I personally use Juice, which is a free download. (Specific instructions at the bottom of this post.) There's also other software that will do the job for you, including iTunes and iPodderX (for Mac).

    There's also web-based services that will collect podcasts for you, including     Yahoo! Podcasts, myYahoo, myMSN, Odeo, and Google Reader. Most of these will also collect blog posts and other news sources you want to subscribe to, once you're feeling more advanced. (If you've ever seen those little RSS or XML buttons on sites and were like "what's that all about?" that's what they're related to.)

    Whichever you use, software or a web-based podcast collector, you'll need to the     feed URL, which is the web address of the podcast feed, which your podcast collector will check periodically for updates.

    The feed URL for our podcasts is:     http://www.silhobbit.com/silweb/mainpages/feed.xml

    You will need to copy that, and paste it (make sure there's no spaces before or after the address) into wherever your podcast collector asks for it.
     
  4. You can always just chicken out and download them manually. If you don't want to get into this whole business, there's links on the Podcast page. You can check back every week or so, download the new one, and maybe an old one you haven't heard yet. They're all good.

Feel free to contact me at podcasts@silhobbit.com if you have any problems or questions.

How to subscribe to the Silhobbit podcast in Juice:

  1. Grab the free download of Juice from http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/#download and follow the installation instructions
  2. Click on the Subscriptions tab, then the Add New Feed icon (or use the Tools menu)
  3. Enter http://www.silhobbit.com/silweb/mainpages/feed.xml into the URL box and click on Save
  4. This will check the feed file and show you how many episodes are available
  5. It will also tick and start to download the latest one.
  6. If it doesn't download the latest one, or if you want to catch up, then tick the episodes you want and click on either of the Download icons
  7. You can listen to an episode straight from Juice by clicking on the icon next to it's name, or by finding the downloaded file on your PC and opening it like normal.
  8. Then, each and every time you open Juice, it'll check your subscribed feeds and download the latest episodes automatically for you.

 

How to add a podcast in iTunes:

  1. Copy the podcast's feed URL.
  2. In iTunes, click on the Advanced menu.
  3. Select Add a Podcast...
  4. Paste the feed URL into the box (make sure there's no spaces before or after the URL) and click OK.
  5. iTunes will begin downloading the most recent episode. The rest of the episodes in the series will have a "GET" button by them, click on it for each older episode you'd like to download.
  6. If you want to get back to your podcast subscriptions later, you can see them all by clicking on Podcasts in the Source panel on the left-hand side.
  7. If you're concerned about hard drive space, you can delete episodes from your hard drive directly from iTunes. Just select the files you want to delete, hit the "delete" key, and (after it asks you a couple are-you-sure-type questions, it's done. You may need to empty your Recycle Bin after, just to finish the job.
     

Thanks to Dave Cusick, from the Post Modern Rock Show for these instructions. Check out Dave's show and podcast at www.postmodernrock.com/