15-Minute Reviews :: Podcast Wizard v1.1.0.90

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Podcast Wizard version 1.1.0.90 by ExtraLabs Software – An application to aid you in the building of podcasts.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Podcast Wizard is an innovational product that turns creating podcasts into a surprisingly easy and pleasant task. It has never been easier to create, edit and publish podcasts. For your convenience, the process of creating a podcast split into several steps and designed the program in the form of a New Podcast Wizard You can record voice, music or other sounds, mix audio, edit and process final tracks, create a RSS feed and publish a podcast on a server.

Podcast Wizard has a built-in FTP client and completely complies with the RSS 2.0 and iTunes specifications. Besides, you can save a final podcast in the MP3, WAV, WMA and OGG formats. While creating this product, we tried to take into account the opinions of dozens of people from all over the world, both beginners and advanced podcasters.”

Quick Pros

• Extremely easy to use wizard interface
• Choose between MP3, OGG or WAV formats (No WMA)
• Capability to create a new RSS feed or add to an existing feed

Quick Cons

• Extent of help is a single Flash tutorial
• No secure FTP support
• Music plays back during recording
• Description not quite accurate in a few aspects
• Too simple and not feature-rich

Expansion

The interface to Podcast Wizard is extremely simple. The step-by-step wizard takes you through choosing whether to create a new podcast or add to an existing one; The recording settings including adding a background track and what style of mic recording, encoding and sound levels; The actual process of recording with a nice record-level graph; Creating or adding to an existing podcast for the RSS feed; Assembling the actual RSS and its information; And finally the option to use the built-in FTP to upload your podcast. It’s all relatively easy, mostly due to the fact that there isn’t much to this application. The interface looks really sharp for the most part; Granted there’s a lot of dead space on most pages except the RSS feed page and the FTP page.

During my testing, I did find the application did work pretty well for how simple and feature-bare it is. The biggest benefit to this application is just how simple it is for someone to get into podcasting, even if it may not be a top-notch result. Another great benefit is that the application does build the RSS file for you, making it very easy to syndicate a podcast show series and acquire a subscription base for your podcasts.

Some issues I do have with this application however; First off, the extent of the help you recieve from this application is the online video tutorial – While the application does imply there is more than one tutorial, there is actually only one tutorial and it walks you through the creation of a new podcast, feed and FTP, and does not go into detail on how to add to an existing feed which I felt might be the biggest challenge for a newcomer to RSS and podcasting. While there is no link to it in the application, there is a manual included in the package as well, but it is essentially an application description, purchase information (Which for some reason lists significantly-higher prices – $59.95 for single license), license agreement and information on their company, and no actual help content.

As well, the application does play back the audio track you chose for the background. This likely wouldn’t be an issue, but you need to either make sure your speakers are turned off or down low enough that the mic won’t pick it up, or use a pair of headphones while recording to prevent echoing.

Another issue with this application is the lack of secure FTP. With many man-in-the-middle attacks, all connections transmitting passwords really need to be secured for your own safety. This application does not provide Secure FTP support, so I really would recommend being careful with using the FTP support, especially in any sort of public/wireless setting.

One of my biggest quips with this application is that the description of this application does not seem to match the application well. First off, there was no WMA support to be found at all; Only MP3, OGG and WAV. The a portion of the last sentence of the first paragraph states ‘You can record voice, music or other sounds, mix audio, edit and process final tracks…’ Really, all you can do here is record from what source you may have selected through Windows (Typically the microphone) and have another audio file play back and record at the same time. There is no real ‘mixing’ functionality, nor any editing or processing of the audio once your recording is complete, unless they imply processing and editing by the building of the RSS and uploading.

Final Verdict

While this application does provide a simple way for someone to get started in podcasting, it is really too simple on the recording-side of the process. I did like the RSS functionality and that there was a good amount of functionality there. For free, while it does function, I would likely steer people from this application if you are looking to make podcasting a regular feature of your website unless you are looking for something extremely simple. As for paying $34.97 for this title, I could not recommend this while there are many other alternatives out there. For free, you could pick up Audacity (Open Source) for creating your audio files, and then Easypodcast (Open Source) for creating your RSS feed. I also found this link on Podcastingnews.com with a listing of other software titles as well.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, October 24, 2007