Podcasting The Olde Dope Peddler Show

"Podcasting" is a way to get the The Olde Dope Peddler weekly show automatically downloaded to your computer or portable audio player. This is a nice convenience if you have a portable MP3 player or if you have a slow connection. Once you have things set up, you will always have access to the most recent shows, as MP3 files on your computer or portable device, ready for listening!

Step 1: Get A Podcasting Program

To get started, you will need to install a podcasting program, a number of which are freely available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

• iPodder (Free Software: Windows, Mac and Linux). At the moment, this is one of the most popular solutions for receiving Podcast feeds. Recommended.
• iTunes (Freeware: Windows, Mac). This is Apple's flagship music-playing program, which, starting with version 4.9, has support for receiving podcasts. Note that even though you go through the "music store" to find podcast feeds, there is, as always, no charge for receiving The Olde Dope Peddler Show
• FireANT (Freeware: Windows, Mac). A popular option for downloading video podcasts (including ours), FireANT is also compatible with our audio podcast if you prefer.
• DTV (Free Software: currently Mac OS X only, Windows and Linux planned). A project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, DTV is a particularly good choice for receiving our video podcast.

Step 2: Subscribe to the The Olde Dope Peddler Show Podcast Feed

Once you have downloaded and installed a podcast program, you will need to add the The Olde Dope Peddler Show podcast feed. You can right-click any of the following link and select "copy link location". These links go directly to the XML file. If you click on them directly in your web browser, you will see the raw XML code. Don't be frightened! Please follow the instructions on this page to "subscribe" to the feed in your software of choice.

Step 3: Start downloading

Once you have subscribed to the The Olde Dope Peddler Show podcast feed, you just need to tell the podcast software to start downloading. From then on, the program will occasionally check for new shows, and when they are available, it will download them.

If you have a portable MP3 player, you may need to tell your podcast program which one you use, or configure it to save the files in the correct directory.

Check the documentation or web site for your podcast software for details.

Why Podcast?

If you like to listen to The Olde Dope Peddler Show, but you don't have time to wait for downloads or watch the live broadcast, then this solution is for you. It grabs the show every day for you, automatically. And, if you have a portable MP3-playing device and you're about to walk out the door, it's ready to go!

For more detailed history and discussion of pocasting, check out the following resources:

• Podcasting Page at Wikipedia
• Engadget.com (How to get Podcasts and also make your own)
• iPodder.org - Information and links

What's a Podcast?

You may have heard of the term "RSS" -- it stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and many recent web browsers like Mozilla FireFox have built-in support for RSS "Feeds". An RSS feed makes it easy for programs to check a web site and easliy find out when new stories or articles were published on a web site. A podcast is really an RSS feed that also contains information about an MP3 file that can be downloaded.

You need to install a podcast program on your computer, tell it about a podcast feed you want to subscribe to, and it will check to see when new information is available. When a new show is uploaded to the web site, the podcasting software will start downloading the MP3 file in the background to a directory.