May 03, 2005

Podcast Review: Viva Podcast

This entry posted in: 4 stars , I subscribe , Podcast Review

Viva Podcast

Format: conversation
Content: music and movie commentary, general life stuff
Rating: 4 stars
What I'm going to do: subscribe
Typical Length: 15 - 25 minutes; typically right around 20

Your hosts, Lisa and Greg, are parents, students, music and movie lovers, and podcasters especiale. The Viva podcast is a podcast primarily about this couple's life. The interchange between the two of them is smooth and flows well, keeping the podcast moving along and highly listenable.

Greg and Lisa (let's not show any favoritism, eh?) are heavily into music and movies, so along with a little bit of content about school, jobs, and kids, much of what they discuss has to do with movies and music. They treat us to movie reviews and commentary, not just about first run movies, but also about rentals and movies that are off the beaten track with the occasional trailer review thrown in for good measure. On the music front Greg and Lisa listen to quite a bit of new music and give us some pretty in-depth looks at what they're listening to. They also listen to a lot of music that doesn't make the main-stream radio air-waves (at least not where I'm at), so they're a good way to find music you haven't heard about. In addition, while some musicians may rail at this, they often couch their musical comments in "sounds like" comparisons. I guess this tends to pigeon-hole artists, but it's quite helpful when looking for music you may want to try. They also play a portion of a track as a break in the middle of the show, and usually comment on it afterwards.

Lest I mislead, the Viva Podcast isn't about reviewing movies or music. Greg and Lisa also discuss their own life events with an engaging humor and vivacity and sprinkle in a bit of topical or societal commentary often based on something they've seen on television.

The audio quality is typically good; aside from the occasional clipping or distortion (I think caused by one of the hosts getting too close to the mic) the vocals are all clear and easy to understand and the levels are good. However after a recent change to the Propaganda podcasting software they seem to be still working out the levels and there's some new distortion that I hadn't heard before.

The podcast is family- and work-safe, and the balance between music and vocal is good and the fades well-executed. They started out podcasting 5 days a week or so, but have recently dropped back to thrice a week, which is still a healthy amount of work. Meta-data for the podcast is good; the file- and track-names match (which is nice) and consist of a channel name and date, and the album and artist name all work as well. The Viva Podcasts is encoded at 64 kbps, which is a good level for primarily talk.

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Posted by cori at 10:22 AM

April 19, 2005

Podcast Review: May it Please the Court podcast

This entry posted in: 2 and a half stars , I do not subscribe , Podcast Review

WLF | May it Please the Court Law Weblog

Format: short audio blog posts
Content: quote of the day, commentary, rants
Rating: 2 and a half stars
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 1½ - 3 minutes

May It Please the Court is the irregularly published podcast from the Williams Law Firm in California. J. Craig Williams et. al. produce short podcasts containing a quote of the day and some commentary on the headline of the day. Most of the time the headlines and related commentary are related to a legal issue or court case that's come to the attention of the producers. On a few other occasions the loosely law related headline serves as a spring board for a rant about congress in baseball or Microsoft Word.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes a rant is just what the lawyer ordered. I'm certainly guilty of enough of them. But in this case the rants take away from what I perceive to be the value of this 'cast: a short opinion by a lawyer that could serve to clarify a complicated issue. The May It Please the Court blog at the link above certainly fulfills this purpose more often than not in its posts, but the podcast does it less often. On some Fridays, MIPLC repodcasts several other podcasts (Grape Radio and Reel Reviews Radio, to be specific). I'm assuming for the sake of this review that he's got the rights to do so, but I'm not sure why he would choose to repackage that content here.

In terms of audio quality, the actual sound quality is satisfactory, although there are a few occasions where there's significant clipping of the vocals. It's encoded at 128 kbps, which is quite high for the content, but given the short length of the 'cast the size of the files is still negligible. The quality of the actual delivery is sometimes uneven; it seems as though the podcasters are still getting used to the medium, but if they continue to podcast I suspect that will improve.

Speaking of rants, this is probably the first podcast the I've reviewed where I have a beef with its RSS feed. For one thing, there's no tag, which means that audio.weblogs.com will not accept a ping (for what it's worth, for this reason is almost a required element for podcast feeds). It's also missing all contact and date information at the channel level. These are all optional elements, and though I can't see any reason why the shouldn't be there, they don't have to be. However, the elements have the required attribute of "length", but it's always filled with "1". This means that iPodder (and some other aggregators beside, I'd surmise) don't know how big the enclosure is. Not a killer problem, but an inconvenience.

May It Please the Court also produces a tech channel and a video blog ("Vlawg") with different content. They originally requested reviews for both podcasts, but unless there's some more activity on the tech channel I don't see a reason to add it to the queue.

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Posted by cori at 09:35 PM

April 12, 2005

Podcast Review: Shakespeare Souffle

This entry posted in: 3 stars , I do not subscribe , Podcast Review

Shakespeare Souffle

Format: rambling talk
Content: talk about Bradley family culture
Rating: 3 stars
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 15 - 30 minutes

Shakespeare Souffle is a "blogcast" of the audio antics of a family of 4 from Chicago. Subject matter is as widely varied as the activities and events of Bradley family life, ranging from a soundscape of a typical day to a recording of a trip to the field museum to 2 or 4 of the family members (and maybe some firends, too) sitting around a microphone and talking.

This family has the good fortune to get along well and to lead fairly busy and interesting lives, as families go. They're homeschoolers and have what appears to be a wide social circle. Daughter Fiona and son Liam get along as well as can be expected, as do the parents Ken and Kim. They have a cat. Fiona is a girl-scout, and Kim participates as well.

If you found the preceding paragraph somewhat interesting then Shakespeare Souffle is for you. If you found it less than compelling (as I did) then probably not, because that's largely the extent of the content on Shakespeare Souffle; details of the Bradley family life. My intention here is not to belittle the effort the Bradley's are putting in to their podcast; quite the opposite. They enjoy the podcasting, and it is the first podcast that I've heard that involves an entire family. They have a great time doing it and it's a great new way for a family to spend some additional time with each other, which is great! However, for some listeners the subject matter will be less than riveting.

Early in the podcast series Shakespeare Souffle suffered from some problems with audio quality. They've made great gains in that area more recently and their "at home" podcasts are intelligible, although with 4 or more people around a microphone it's inevitably hard to hear some portions and other portions are too loud. Their mobile 'casts still have some quality difficulties, but that's perhaps in the very nature of mobile podcasting. Track-naming is adequate but not ideal, comprised of the podcast channel name and podcast number, but no date; the file names contain the date and a shortened name, which is fairly accessible. Tracks are encoded at a variety of bit-rates, from 64kbps (probably a good rate) down to 24 kbps (too low in my opinion), and may be the cause of some of the quality problems they've had, especially seeing that the later podcasts have been the one with the higher bit-rates. The show is typically kid- and work-friendly, but on occasion hasn't been - and they've let the listeners know when it's not, which is good form. The Bradleys podcast somewhat irregularly, but average about every 2 weeks.

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Posted by cori at 03:57 PM

April 08, 2005

Podcast Review: open source sex

This entry posted in: 3 and a half stars , I do not subscribe , Podcast Review

tiny nibbles - podcasting
Format: talk
Content: education sex talk and reading of erotica
Rating: 3 and a half stars
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 15 - 35 minutes

Disclaimer: this review may not be suitable for all audiences

Our host for Open Source Sex, Violet Blue, is a professional sex educator, author, and porn reviewer. As such she is highly qualified for the content of her podcast. Not only does she have a strong background in pornography and sex education; I believe she's also given up her day job to do this stuff full-time. Violet (may I call you Violet?) is striving to open our minds to the power of eroticism, fantasy, and sexual play.

She does a good job of it, as well. Her voice is well-suited to reading erotica, with a soft and sultry quality, and while she's not an actor she clearly enjoys the reading and puts herself into the characters' roles.

Early in her podcasts she was including a little more in the way of educational topics, and the more recent ones have been directed more exclusively at readings of a wide variety of erotica, from the racy to the raunchy. I don't think of myself as a prude, but I'm less interested in the erotica than in the educational topics Violet covered in her first podcast or two. She has returned to more "informative" topics in her latest podcast, however. In any case, if you're looking for erotica in a podcast, this is the place to go.

Violet's early podcasts suffered from some audio quality problems; the audio was difficult to hear on my portable player, even when turned all the way up and piped through my car's audio system. The levels were OK for listening on my laptop, however. In addition, there was a liitle bit of a tin-can syndrome in the first few podcasts. Since then, however, the audio has improved greatly, although they could still stand a little more volume. Violet encodes at a variety of bitrates, the early podcasts encoded at 32 kbps, which probably accounts for some of the quality issues. The more recent ones are anywhere from 64 kbps to 128 kbps, although I think the 64 kbps would be sufficient. The podcast meta-data is lacking some detail, but the latest few have been OK, albeit without a date tag in the file name (rant).

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Posted by cori at 06:31 AM

April 05, 2005

Recent Submissions: 2005-04-04

This entry posted in: podcastreviews.net

Here's what's been added since the last update. These have been posted to The New, New Podcast Review: Review Queue as well.

    From the search log

    Still digging out....

Site news

Let's see. Well, I've caught up adding things to the queue, including these. While I'm on the subject, I changed the queue to use OPML and the activeRenderer APIs to display the list. It's the same organization that I use for the reviewed podcast list, so moving stuff from one to the other will be a lot easier. It also means that the "done" reviews in the queue are gone, but they're (almost) all in the reviewed list (I'm missing a few of the 3.5 star reviews still) and they were mostly cluttering up the queue anyway. Doing this led me to question the OPML architecture that I'm using for these. I'm putting html-escaped tags in the "text" attributes of the <outline> tags, which makes them display as links, which is pretty nice. However, it also means that the OPML is all but unreadable by humans, and I suspect that many apps that would read it probably don't like it much. So I'm thinking about changing that. To do so I'd have to have 2 <outline>s per submission - 1 for the site and 1 for the feed. If anyone has thoughts on this, please feel free to leave a comment.

As I noted above I'm still digging out of the search log backlog, but I don't feel a lot of urgency for that. I'm trying to settle into a more regular schedule between this and my other writing; we'll see how that goes.

Have a great week!

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Posted by cori at 12:12 AM

April 04, 2005

Podcast Review: Tech Nation

This entry posted in: 4 stars , I watch , Podcast Review

IT Conversations; Tech Nation

Format: interviews
Content: Technically knowledgable host and guests talking about the guests specialities
Rating: 4 stars
What I'm going to do: watch podcast feed
Typical Length: 5 - 40 minutes

Dr. Moira Gunn is something of a jack of all trades, with degrees in Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and work experience as a professor and at NASA. Perhaps that serves to explain the varied nature of the Tech Nation podcast's guests and subject matter.

Tech Nation is produced for public radio, and is one of IT Conversations first forays into repackaging National Public Radio audio into podcasts. The NPR show's format typically consists of 2 or more interviews; the IT Conversation series breaks these into separate 'casts. The Tech Nation website has similar information to the detail pages at IT Conversations, and points solely to IT Conversations for the internet audio.

One of the most refreshing aspects of the Tech Nation podcast is that unlike most tech podcasts (for example most of the techpodcasts.com affiliates), Tech Nation doesn't focus primarily on computer, web, and gadget technology. Dr. Gunn covers everything from special effects (Jim Rygiel - effects supervisor, LotR) to social science (Barbara Heinzen - geographer and social scientist). One of the interviews from each set is often part of a regular sub-series; Bio Tech Nation, which deals with, um, biotechnology. Guests cover the gamut from authors to entrepeneurs, professors to CEOs, programmers to futurists.

As we've come to expect from the IT Conversations series, the audio is well-mixed and well produced. The balance of host and guest voices is even and the intro / outro music fades smoothly into Dr. Gunn's own vocal introduction and closing. File- and track-naming is adequate, including both channel (series) name and the name of the guest; however I would like to see a date tag in the name in addition to the existing information. Also, more recently IT Conversations has begun naming the tracks with an abbreviated channel name (i.e. "ITC.TN..."), which I find less clear than the older naming, which had the full name of the series (i.e. "Tech Nation"). That said, the shorter name is probably more useful on a portable device, where the slow scrolling of longer names can be frustrating.

Tech Nation is produced weekly.

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Subscribe to AAC.

Also see reviews of other IT Conversations Series:
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; The Gillmor Gang
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Voices in Your Head
The New, New Podcast Review: Podcast Review: IT Conversations; Memory Lane

Disclosure: To avoid any sense of impropriety, I am going to be working on IT Conversations as an editor in the near future.

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Posted by cori at 09:49 PM

April 01, 2005

Podcast Review: Acowo Podcast

This entry posted in: 3 and a half stars , I do not subscribe , Podcast Review

ACOWO: Introduction of High Quality Netlabels

Format: individual music tracks
Content: independent music
Rating: 3 and a half stars
What I'm going to do: not subscribe
Typical Length: 3 - 12 minutes

The Acowo podcast is essentially a companion to the Acowo blog, a resource for "Introduction of High Quality Netlabels." In other words, Acowo is essentially a site for tracking new releases from a few hand-picked netlabels.

Your host at the weblog is Kengo Miyazaki, and for this site he's picked a few "labels that are dealing with minimal, techno, abstract, experimental, ambient, noise and stuff like that." (from the FAQ). Kengo blogs information about new releases from his chosen labels, including label, artist, album, track information, availability of a donation page or shop, license for the MP3s, and host for the MP3s. There is often additional descriptive information about the artist culled from the source site for the netlabel. To that extent, the Acowo site seems to be a very useful place to find new music of this sort.

The podcast aspect of the production consists of the individual tracks that Kengo links to from the blog posts; all of the tracks he posts links to on the site are also 'cast over the feed. In this sense the Acowo podcast is very similar to the Starfrosch Podcast. I have detailed my opinions of single-track podcasts previously, in the reviews for both the Starfrosch Podcast and The Big Chap Podcast, so I won't go into detail here. Suffice it to say I can't comment meaningfully on delivery or production values for this podcast. The music Kengo podcasts is not altogether to my taste, but it is well executed and of high quality. The encoding rate is high (typically 192 kbps or above) frequently resulting in fairly large downloads. Given that the podcast comes out several times a week, you'll be downloading a fair amount of data. Track naming is satisfactory, and the file naming is OK as well, although it's sometimes difficult to decipher.

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Posted by cori at 03:58 PM

March 30, 2005

Podcast Review: The Bob & AJ Show

This entry posted in: 4 stars , I watch , Podcast Review

The BobAndAJ Show

Format: funny talk with some music
Content: interviews, music, general shenanigans
Rating: 4 stars
What I'm going to do: watch this feed
Typical Length: 40 - 60 minutes

The Bob and AJ show comes to us from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and is (I believe) the first Canadian podcast I've reviewed. I really liked listening to these guys, partly because I lived for a few years in Sudbury, Ontario and hearing them speak brought back a lot of memories.

Bob and AJ mix up talk and music in a pretty good melange; they typically play 2-3 songs during the course of the show, and their musical taste is good. They've found some good artists in GarageBand and at least a few really good ones (Christa Couture in particular comes to mind), and must spend a fair amount of time researching their selections. The talk in the show centers around podcasting and recently they've been doing a lot of Skype interviews with other podcasters. In addition they throw in a fair amount of personal talk (but not too personal, if you know what I mean). Their self-deprecating humour (threw in that extra 'u' just for you guys, Bob and AJ) and self-effacing manner make them both easy to listen to and highly funny.

Bob and AJ are occasionally non-child- or work-safe but are for the most part unoffensive. In fact (and it may not seem a compliment to them) but this is one of the things that appealed to me about the Bob and AJ Show - perhaps I'm just getting old, or perhaps parenthood has taken its toll on me, but gratuitous cursing doesn't appeal to me much anymore. It's refreshing to hear some guys being funny without feeling like they have to swear. They broadcast once a week for now (typically on Sundays) but have been considering doing a shorter show more than once a week. They claim to shoot for 30 minutes but consisitently overshoot that and end up at 40 to 50 minutes. File meta-data is good, but I'd love to see the date in the track name as well (currently just the show number appears) (rant). Also, it'd be nice to have the track lengths in the podcast (rant).

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Posted by cori at 01:08 AM

March 29, 2005

Recent submissions: 2005-03-28

This entry posted in: podcastreviews.net

Here's what's been added since the last update (a month ago). These will be posted to The New, New Podcast Review: Review Queue as well, but not for a bit - I'm revamping the mechnism for the queue so that it's easier to maintain.

    From the search log

    Nothing from the search log again this time; I'll probbaly do an all search log update soon, just so I can clean up the search log but don't lose the data

My apologies to all of you that have submitted podcasts but haven't heard back from me - obviously there are too many for me to respond individually this time. If you read this and think I missed you, please contact me.

In addition, several podcasts have dropped off the list either because they've been discontinued or for some other reason. Podcast King has been moved down the list and Reality Bitchslap Radio has ended, so will be pulled from the queue.

Lastly, you may have noticed a new tag on the Teach42 podcast review, named "I watch". I've added this to the list that previously consisted of "I subscribe" and "I do not subscribe". I determined that those 2 listings were too limiting, because sometimes I'm not interested in a particular subject matter enough to listen to every episode but liked the podcast enough to listen again. In those cases I subscribe to the text posts about the podcasts and watch that feed. If I see content that I think I'll find interesting then I'll listen to that episode. That behavior is represented by the "I watch" tag.

Have a great week!

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Posted by cori at 12:01 AM