With the inception of the iPod and the ubiquity of webpages on the internet the availability of programming, music, movies and video has never been as easy to access. Attaining any form of media is a simple click of the mouse away. For those of you who have recently purchased an iPod, or you are looking for radio programming availibility, many of your radio programs have websites with podcasts.

A podcast is a tool by which a show is recorded through the internet using special software and it is then uploaded to a website in mpeg layer audio file form and available for internet users to download and play. Podcasts can be played through any internet media player such as Windows Media Player, Quicktime or any other mp3 type player. The iPod though makes podcasts portable.

Currently my wife and I receive free Podcast from National Public Radio (NPR). NPR has some of our favorite programms available on Podcast such as Talk of the Nation, Fresh Aire (Terry Gross), Science Friday and Foreign Dispatch to name a few. To receive free podcasts you need to acquire a library or software programm that can manage your files. We currently use iTunes to manage our music, video and podcasts. There are other software libraries besides iTunes to chose from.

Before we acquired over 5000 podcasts we simply visited the NPR website and were directed to their assortment of podcasts. We picked the programms that we were interested in by subscribing and clicking download and they were downloaded into our iTunes podcast library. iTunes also allows you to update current news programs we subscribe to. This feature is available on some podcasts but not all. (Don't be alarmed. Subscription are free and they facilitate updates.) Each time we open up our iTunes library while connected to the internet we will receive that day's updates. .

If you feel adventurious Google the word "Podcasts" and see the thousands of wonderful and free stuff you can get. The trick is to know what you want to listen to, visit the website and find out if they have podcasts available. One gem we found was B.J. Harrison's Classic Tales Podcasts. The dude is an English professor who in his spare time creates podcasts of him reading short stories from Doyle, Poe, Dickens, Wells and a whole bunch of great, deceased authors. For something a little les highbrow, one can download podcasts of the Howard Stern Show or podcasts of your favorite morning D.Js doing something hilarious. Remember the iPod is not just for music it is an educational tool as well.

Learn more about this author, Peter Ruzzo.
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