more Podcasting ideas

The Wall Street Journal mentions how public radio stations are using podcasts to increase their audiences.  I've been a believer for a long time.  But this technology is still very young and there's much more to do.  Here are some things I want in a podcast player:

  • skip
    • 30 sec forward/backward
    • to next/prev segment
  • find
    • first/all occurrences of a particular word or phoneme
    • particular speaker
  • speed
    • play back at faster than real time (I generally hear just fine at 1.2x - 1.5x real time) so you can finish a 1hr talk show in 40 min or less.
    • don't speed up if music is playing
  • mark: some way to mark a segment for later recall, such as linking it to a blog

What are some features you'd like to see?

Published 01 November 06 04:01 by sprague

Comments

# David said on November 2, 2006 1:08 AM:

Hi Richard,

Why are you interested in searching

for a particular phoneme?

Thanks,

David

# Rob Walch said on November 2, 2006 6:19 PM:

I would just like to see simple Podcast support in one of Microsofts products.  All that you want is great.  But right now if you use Microsoft porducts you can not even subcribe to a podcast.  You need 3rd party software to subscribe to podcasts.

No Podcast support in Windows Media Player

None in IE 7

None in Zune Market

Lets take that first step before you sign up to compete in the 110 high hurdles.

Rob @ podCast411

# sprague said on November 2, 2006 8:50 PM:

David,

It's harder for the computer to know how a set of phonemes translates to a particular word, so searching for a phoneme (like "Mike Rowe Soft") is easier than searching for a particular word ("Microsoft").  

Rob, I'm with you -- I am very frustrated at how hard it is to download podcasts in MS products.  Fortunately there are 3rd party products that help, but I wish WM Player supported it natively.

# Walter said on November 6, 2006 8:47 AM:

I think the feature set you have proposed is great. I love Windows Media Player's ability to control the playback speed and use it a lot for listening to podcasts, webcasts, etc at 1.2-1.6 times normal speed for just the reason you mention. I hope that one day this feature makes it into Media Center too.

For the skip feature, I like the forward 30, but back less, the 5 or 6 similar to Media Center makes it easy to back up just a bit if you go a bit too far while skipping forward. That is a feature I wish Windows Media Player had.

The RSS and attachment feature of IE7 does a pretty good job with podcasts and then you can listen to them using Windows Media Player.

New Comments to this post are disabled

Search

This Blog

Syndication

Page view tracker