Tools for Podcasters

Most Sonibyte customers are experienced podcasters who use our tools to upgrade the audio quality of their feed or to better manage and simplify their production process.  However, a few of our customers are unfamiliar with various aspects of podcast production, podcast technology, or the podcast marketplace.  This section of our site is intended to be helpful to them—and to act as a quick reference and convenient set of links for our “pro” users.
Some of this information is also shown on our company blog .  We also provide answers to common questions on our FAQ page.  If you can’t find what you need on this page or one of these others, please email us.  If we don’t have the information, we will try to get it for you.
 

Major Podcast directories

 

Podcasting terms and their definition

  • Autoconcatenation:  Sonibyte's proprietary tool for automatically putting together the pieces of your podcast.
  • Clip:  A small audio file that can be reused in more than one podcast.  Typical clips are intros, outros, and sound spacers.  However, clip can also refer to any audio file, including your audio content.
  • Concatenation:  The process of putting together various clips into a single audio file that is ready to be downloaded and listened to.  To ensure a high quality final file, your Sonibyte sound engineer checks the results of concatenation and makes sure that the sound levels for each clip are correct.
  • Episode:  One podcast file from a series.  Most podcasts offer a new episode on a regular basis--daily, weekly, or monthly.  However, some offer episodes as events occur or as the podcast creator happens to interview a new guest or learn of a new interesting subject to discuss.
  • Feed:  Podcast episodes are gathered into a feed.  A user subscribes to a feed, using a feed reader or feed subscription manager.  The feed exposes information on new episodes to those who have subscribed to it.
  • Feedreader:  A piece of software for managing the information in a feed.  The best known tool for podcasts is Apple's iTunes reader.
  • Intro:  An audio clip at the start of a podcast episode that identifies the podcast.  Intros are an important part of branding a podcast.  Sonibyte will help create a professional-quality intro, as part of the process of setting up a new feed.
  • MPEG format: The Moving Pictures Expert Group format for storing audio files is the most widely accepted audio storage approach.  All major audio file players support this format.  MPEG provides lossless compression of file formats and stores information on the owner of a file and the nature of its content.
  • Outro:  An audio clip that appears at the end of a podcast.  This clip reinforces the branding message of the podcast and typically indicates when a listener should expect to receive a future episode.
  • Podcast directory:  A number of Web sites seek to inventory podcast feeds and make them easy to search, find, and download.
  • Podcasting:  The process of creating a series of audio files and distributing them to listeners using an RSS feed.
  • Podcatcher:  A piece of software that looks for new episodes of a podcast.  When it finds a new episode, it automatically downloads the episode to the users computer or listening device.
  • Publishing a Podcast:  Describes the process of updating a podcast feed with a new episode.  An important part of this process is notifying and updating podcast directories, so that they know a new episode is available.
  • RSS:  Really Simple Syndication is a standard for managing the distribution of text, audio, and video content.
  • Sample rate:  Sound is an analog signal is that has a continuous wave pattern.  To store sound in a digital file, we must take samples of the sound waves.  If we take sampels more often, we get a higher quality digital copy and better sound reproduction, when our audio file is played.  Podcasts typically are sampled at 44KHz or 44,000 times per second.
  • Voiceover:  Converting text to speech is called voiceover.  The artists who do this are called "voiceover artists" or "voices."
  • WAV format:  Many programs that capture sound automatically store the information in WAV format.  Most podcasters convert from this format to MPEG format, because MPEG format is more standardized and offers better compression than WAV format.
  • XML:  Extended Markup Language can be used to describe non-text content in Web pages.  It is also used to describe the information needed for a podcast reader or podcatcher to find the podcast files in an RSS feed.

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