Macsimum News - Freshly Squeezed Reviews: Take that, Orwell!

Freshly Squeezed Reviews: Take that, Orwell!

Posted by Frank Petrie Apple ico Oct 17, 2005 at 12:05am

Podcasting is nothing short of a revolution. A revolution for thought, imagination and breaking the stranglehold that corporations and monopolies have put in place. Even though you have the tools already in your computer to create and publish a podcast, being true Macophiles, a “one stop shop” solution would be excellent. Enter Podcast Maker, a US$30 product from Potion Factory.

According to its creators, it’s ”... an impossibly small software company located in a garage somewhere in the heart of Los Angeles…,” and Podcast Maker ”... is simply wonderful. You can actually publish a podcast with literally two clicks of the mouse. You don’t have to type in any settings at all. It just works.”

Well, I don’t have anything interesting to say (witness my reviews), but it would be nice to know that I could jump into the fray in true Mac fashion.

The Juice

Installation is the same ol’, same ol’. Podcast Maker’s look is intuitive. Very, very intuitive. In fact, just before I went to bed the other night, I felt compelled to try and create a podcast and publish it to the iTunes Music Store via my .Mac account (you can also publish via ftp and sftp). Half asleep, I published an audio podcast and a video podcast, then submitted them to iTMS, all without looking at the manual once! Didn’t need any online help, whatsoever.

After Apple provided the clearance, both were added to the iTMS’ podcast directory! Check the audio podcast by going to iTMS and searching in the podcast section for “test review”/Artist Frank Petrie.” You can see the vodcast by typing “NJ Tiger” into the search field.

It has all the fields laid out logically for all your ID3 tags (information), laying out your chapters and a pane to drag-and-drop your graphics. You can pretty much do this without having to get your fingers dirty with coding!

For the geeks, you can enhance an MP3 file (the conversion to m4a works just like iTunes). It will “take into consideration the bit rate, sample rate, and channel layout to produce an optimal m4a file.” It has a new progress slider, a new spectrum analyzer that is visible during playback and a time ticker.

The Pits

Nada.

The Rind
 Nada.

The Pulp

Podcast Maker is another one of those breeds of one-trick-pony, except that it takes several tricks and rolls them into one. It has a trial period that lasts days. For those of you doing weekly podcasts, it should allow you to at least produce four podcasts before having to decide to purchase or not.

I wish the price was just a bit lower. That “30” number can be frightening. But Podcast Maker does everything it promises and with true Mac simplicity. If you’re headed into the future of media distribution, this is a must have tool.

Now, if I only had something to say.

Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10

System requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher; QuickTime 7.0.2 or higher