Lesson 12. Producing Your First Podcast
iLife does more than provide tools for creating media; it offers conduits for delivering that media to the people who are interested in it, across the globe, via the Internet. GarageBand is a multipurpose tool. It's mostly known for multitrack audio creation. As you may have experienced in Lesson 11, creating music is harder than it looks. But GarageBand has a simpler side: one focused solely on recording and "sweetening" audio-only productions. These special audio productions have gained a great deal of attention in recent years. They're called podcasts. Technically speaking, podcasts are relatively small audio files that can be found and downloaded from all over the Internet. Like radio shows, podcasts can be subscribed to for free or sometimes for a small fee. The iTunes Music Store has many available podcasts on a myriad of topics. Creating them yourself is remarkably simple. Note Sweetening is the term used for taking an ordinary audio track and adding little bits here and theresound effects, background music, and so onto make it more rich and nuanced. Now, creating a podcast might strike the average person as pretty specialized, something that a business owner might be interested in, but what about a parent, or a kid? It seems unlikely. But taken from another angle, podcasting is just one more way to express yourself and communicate with other people. It needn't be commercial, and it needn't be complicated. Decades ago, parents would sometimes record their children having a conversation and send the cassette tapes out to family members to let them share in particularly endearing moments. And teens frequently keep journals and diaries of every sort stuffed under mattresses and today, online at community Web sites. A podcast is just one more way to record momentswithout requiring the apparent complexities of videoand distribute them across the Internet to people who want to share. Creating a podcast is easy in GarageBand. Getting the finished project online for people to enjoy is equally simple using iWeb. Let's revisit Jennifer's Sgraffito training video from Lesson 5, this time using GarageBand (instead of iMovie). This will provide a direct comparison of the two tools and the two kinds of products they produce. This lesson will also provide a solid introduction to iWeb. iWeb is a great tool, but its usefulness is contingent on having an account with .Mac, Apple's suite of Internet services, which includes Web hosting. As a sophisticated Macintosh user for many years, Jennifer initially imagined a user-friendly Internet account like .Mac to be unnecessary. Her company maintains a Web site on a local hosting service, and she has been very happy with it. Still, the .Mac account is more than an ordinary Web host; it's one that's highly tuned to work with the iLife applications. In the same way that music effortlessly moves from iTunes to iMovie and iPhoto, iWeb is like an interface with your .Mac account. The iWeb-.Mac combination makes it easy to build, update, and share your Web pages, slideshows, and movies. After years of conspicuous avoidance, Jennifer got a .Mac account to streamline all her iLife workand she even investigated a way to integrate it with her existing Web site for maximum effect. But in the end, it was hard to beat the convenience and professional look of the site she made herself in iWeb. (For more information on .Mac accounts, see the "Getting Started" chapter.) |
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