Thoughts on iPods and Podcasts
So, for those who aren't aware, I drive an hour each way to and from work each workday. This means that I spend about two hours in the car, Monday through Friday. Ten hours per week. That's a fair amount of time, particularly in an area with no kickass radio stations. As a consequence, I have grown to consider my iPod to be indispensable. I've had people ask me what the hell I listen to on those trips, and ... well ... I might as well tell everyone in one fell swoop.
First off, I'm a big fan of Audible.com, where I have a Premium account. This means that I can get the New York Times (hour-long) daily digest for free, and for some time, I did precisely that. Unfortunately, the narrator they have for the digest has a somewhat soporific voice, and I generally started to drift off around the business pages. Plus, given the Podcasts I've been listening to, this has become somewhat redundant. More important is their audiobooks. I've long since gone through most of the audiobooks I found interesting in my local library, so Audible's selection is awfully nice. At present, I'm working through George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. The first three books are all narrated by Roy Dotrice (who played Wesley Windham-Price's disapproving father in Angel and Mozart's disapproving father in Amadeus), whom I can recommend wholeheartedly. (The same goes for Lenny Henry's narration of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.) Believe me: with audiobooks, the narrator is about 70% of the selling point.
This accounts for about 30-40% of my listening time. The rest is generally eaten by Podcasts, of which I can recommend several (most pulled down through the iTunes music store, rather than through an explicit RSS feed):
First off, I'm a big fan of Audible.com, where I have a Premium account. This means that I can get the New York Times (hour-long) daily digest for free, and for some time, I did precisely that. Unfortunately, the narrator they have for the digest has a somewhat soporific voice, and I generally started to drift off around the business pages. Plus, given the Podcasts I've been listening to, this has become somewhat redundant. More important is their audiobooks. I've long since gone through most of the audiobooks I found interesting in my local library, so Audible's selection is awfully nice. At present, I'm working through George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. The first three books are all narrated by Roy Dotrice (who played Wesley Windham-Price's disapproving father in Angel and Mozart's disapproving father in Amadeus), whom I can recommend wholeheartedly. (The same goes for Lenny Henry's narration of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.) Believe me: with audiobooks, the narrator is about 70% of the selling point.
This accounts for about 30-40% of my listening time. The rest is generally eaten by Podcasts, of which I can recommend several (most pulled down through the iTunes music store, rather than through an explicit RSS feed):
- CNN and NPR offer five minute news summaries, which are updated hourly and which I listen to nearly without fail.
- Ebert and Roeper's movie reviews are also available as Podcasts (generally released on Thursdays), though I'm a much larger fan of Roger Ebert than of Richard Roeper; consequently, Ebert's recent absence due to cancer-related surgery almost prompted me to remove this one from my list o' podcasts.
- Jim Lehrer's NewsHour also offers most of their stories, interviews, and panels as podcast downloads, which accounts for the majority of my news consumption.
- NPR's All Songs Considered has a weekly podcast (released Thursdays) which accounts for much of my exposure to new and offbeat artists. If I were to point to a single one of these as a recommendation, this would be the one, as the sheer breadth of music they present means that you will find at least one track on a given show to be interesting.
- NPR also offers their "Story of the Day" and their "International Story of the Day," which they cull from their various news programs (All Things Considered, Day to Day, Talk of the Nation, etc.).
- Have Games, Will Travel is a more-or-less-weekly podcast by Paul Tevis (ptevis), focusing on board games, card games, and role-playing games. There's a surprising subculture of gaming podcasts out there, and Tevis is perhaps my favorite.
- The Viking Youth Power Hour is a group of four Chicago guys in their late-20s to early-30s range who put out a surprisingly interesting show which explores largely left-leaning modern popular culture, magic(k), and the quality of the alcohol they're imbibing during the show. moonandserpent introduced me to this show a while back, and I am slowly working my way through their archives.
- Woot.com, which amounts to a Home Shopping Network for the techie set, also puts out a daily podcast which is short, amusing, and occasionally informative, which is more or less all I ask of a podcast.
- Likewise, The Onion produces a daily faux-news short that I listen to, generally before I even leave the house.
- Edit: I nearly forgot that NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is also podcast. For a humorous run-down of the week's news, you could do much worse.
- Occulterati, which I found on jeregenest's del.icio.us feed.
- Though this wouldn't work well in a car, Battlestar Galactica producer Ron Moore apparently puts out an episode-by-episode podcast, which is meant to act as a secondary audio track to each episode. My friend Chase, who pointed this out to me, claims that half the fun is listening to Moore pour himself scotch and get pleasantly drunk during each podcast, describing behind-the-scenes stuff that you wouldn't necessarily get for a television show. Definitely something to play around with once we've caught up with our DVD watching.