
Voices of America - tintinnabula
https://newrepublic.com/article/140976/voices-america-podcasts-stories-individual-obsession
======
slg
>Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion
that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally
enriching, whether it’s a history lecture broadcast from a university, or an
amateur talk show recorded in someone’s garage. Both types of show are
somewhat educational, in the sense that they expose listeners to unfamiliar
subjects and subcultures.

This is only true if you ignore any podcast that doesn't fit in those two
random buckets that the author made up. There are plenty of big sport podcasts
that are taking the place of sports talk radio. There are also a huge number
of successful comedy podcasts if you start scrolling down past the top 25 on
iTunes.

If you are looking for great examples that fly in the face of that "aura of
cultural snobbery", I can't recommend enough the podcast network of Maximum
Fun [1]. It is a network created by the host of the NPR show Bullseye, Jesse
Thorn. Most of the podcasts on the network are silly and stupid in the best
possible ways. Even the shows that talk about serious issues don't take
themselves overly serious.[2] The network is currently wrapping up their
annual NPR style pledge drive and most shows are putting out their best
episodes this week so it would be a great time to try some. My personal
favorite is Jordan Jesse Go which is one of the oldest podcast around and is
anything but snobby and highbrow. [3]

[1] - [http://maximumfun.org/](http://maximumfun.org/)

[2] - A great recent episode in which Jesse Thorn, the host of NPR's Bullseye
interviews Guy Branum, the host of Max Fun's Pop Rocket about his new TV show,
growing up different in a small town, and coming out in graduate school.
-[http://maximumfun.org/pop-rocket/pop-rocket-
episode-116-bonu...](http://maximumfun.org/pop-rocket/pop-rocket-
episode-116-bonus-guy-branum-interview)

[3] - [http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/jordan-jesse-
go](http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/jordan-jesse-go)

~~~
sealjam
I really can't understand that first quote. Even if you believe you're doing
something "highbrow and personally enriching", that doesn't make you a snob.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
If you do something highbrow _because it 's highbrow_, that probably does in
fact make you a snob. Whether that was intended by the original quote, I will
leave others to decide.

~~~
ImSkeptical
I disagree. You might want to experience a change of pace. You might be
interested in what "highbrow" is. You might like to challenge yourself.

To be a snob, I believe you'd have to look down on other people for their
preferred content forms. E.g. "Oh, you're reading a website? I remember when I
used to do that. Before I had discovered podcasts."

------
panglott
tl/dr: Thanks to Serial, podcasting has acquired a snobby cultural cachet
among the NPR set, but it has surprising origins 10 years earlier among nerds.
Still, it can't entirely replace public broadcasting.

What a weird take on podcasting.

~~~
CharlesW
> _Still, it can 't entirely replace public broadcasting._

If you mean "public broadcasting" as what they _do_ , I'm with you 100%.
Nothing about podcasting reduces the need for not-for-profit organizations
like this.

If you mean the radio-based sound delivery system part, this must transition
to the open web, and that means podcasting¹.

> _What a weird take on podcasting._

Amen!

¹At least for on-demand delivery. There's no live equivalent to the podcasting
ecosystem right now.

~~~
panglott
"Public broadcasting" means a lot of different things. But one of the great
values of radio-based sound delivery systems is that they are very local. And
local radio cultivates niches that translate well into interesting podcasts.

For example, when studying languages, one of the great sources of listening
material is podcasts produced by local radio stations. There isn't a lot of
material in Cajun French (vs. Parisian French) available—except for Cajun
French music and local news radio shows/podcasts in south Louisiana. There's
an Ainu-learning podcast I subscribed to once that IIRC was produced by a
Hokkaido radio station. The local base of the radio station has synergy with a
non-local/Internet audience.

The major European non-English broadcasters tend to have streaming services
rather than podcasts for some reason.

------
camtarn
"We are living through a great flowering of the podcast industry, whose
province of iTunes is something like a frontier boomtown right now, teeming
with hastily erected new storefronts. The podcast form has been around since
about 2004—it is kissing cousins with the iPod, in that way—but it was only in
2014 that the idea struck gold."

Uhhh... what?

[https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=podcas...](https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=all&q=podcast)

A re-flowering perhaps, looking at the trend's rise since 2014 - but certainly
not as popular as it was around 2005-2006.

~~~
CharlesW
> _A re-flowering perhaps, looking at the trend 's rise since 2014 - but
> certainly not as popular as it was around 2005-2006._

FWIW, that chart doesn't correlate with any measurements of podcasting
popularity (e.g. downloads, research) that I'm aware of.

For example, Edison Research notes that general familiarity with the term
"podcasting" has gone up 22% with Americans in the last two years. Saturday
Night Live's satire of _Serial_ is an example of how podcasting has broken
into mainstream awareness in a way that it definitely had not even three years
ago.

------
SoulMan
I am glad that I found this article. When I search for podcasts, I
predominantly see listings from America and Britain. Unfortunately, I could
not relate to most of them as I grew up in and lived in India. There is
cultural/historical tight coupling with west except some of the BBC ones.

In my opinion, the radio never took off in India. I see old Hollywood films
and realise that in the pre-mobile internet era radio was a major way to be
entertained and communicate while in the road. I can visualise family road
trips (Playing empty roads .. west Virginia on FM) on a deserted free way.
Same for a truck driver and amateurs having ham radio conversation.

On the contrary India Railways have been the primary inter city commute.
People talk to each other instead, as there are always many people around (Its
kind of true everywhere in India :)). However, with cheap mobile internet,
this is changing. co-passengers may get busy on their own smartphone even in a
24 hours long journey. I think we directly jumped from Television to moile
internet never bothered abour radio. There was a rise of world space radio in
mid 2000s but turned out to be costly. With no restriction on pirated mp3s
from the internet and burning them on CD/ putting them in USB sticks and now
side-loading on smart phones, we never bothered about or dependent on music on
radio. This is one of the reason services like Flipkart flyte who offered paid
mp3 download never succeeded. While countries like Norway switching off FM
some of the cities in India are just coming up with their first channels, that
to full of commercial. Its too late for radio I think. With Google installing
free WIFIs in all railway stations and Reliance Jio giving dirt cheap 4G
internet on mobile (as a result all cell companies matching their offers)
having internet enabled phones will be soon a hous hold thing even in a
poorest hoise.

What we don't have is content. There are millions meaning less whatapp hoaxes
being forwarded which most of the people see as interesting and true.
Especially my father's generation refuse to disbelieve anything which is on
the internet(Whatsapp/facebook). There is no sense of responsibility of the
people who spread those messages.

There is no good Indian radio or podcast online now , at least what I think is
good. I think we need a "Serial moment" .

~~~
CharlesW
> _There is no good Indian radio or podcast online now…_

"Good" is subjective of course, but here's a nice, categorized list of many of
the best: [http://rockingentrepreneur.com/list-of-indian-
podcasts/](http://rockingentrepreneur.com/list-of-indian-podcasts/)

If you search for "best indian podcasts" you'll get many other thoughtful
lists of great Indian podcasts.

If you're personally interested in podcasting, this is a unique time in the
history of the medium. You could take advantage of the potential opportunity
by starting your own podcast, or by creating an Indian podcasting network that
helps others create India-centric shows.

------
strictnein
> "The podcast form has been around since about 2004"

Downloadable audio shows predate the iPod and the term "podcasts". For
example:

[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/19981212013454/dailydementi...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/19981212013454/dailydementia.com)

High production values, interviewing guests, etc.

------
dredmorbius
Of all the articles I've read in my life ... that was one of them.

I don't even know where to start, though I'll try.

I access a lot of media, in different forms, much of if online: articles,
books. And quite a bit of spoken or video content.

Most of what counts as "podcast" listening for me comes rather from YouTube,
mostly as recorded lectures or interviews. The better material tends to run 10
- 60 minutes, though it can occasionally go over (most ideas, and speakers, as
well as myself run out of steam after about an hour).

With few exceptions, I tend _not_ to follow any podcasts as such particularly
religiously. There are a few exceptions. I raised a stink some months back
when the CBC blocked my podcasting app (Podcast Republic) from accessing its
content, on the exceedingly slim pretext that PR's occasional text banner ads
constituted "commercial use" \-- and the stink was raised specifically because
Paul Kennedy's _Ideas_ is a very nearly uniformly excellent program. Unusual,
intelligent speakers, outside the Overton window, and generally not heard on
other programs.

The other regular programme is WNYC's _On the Media_ , which is also
excellent, and largely serves as the breech in the news dike I've erected -- a
once-a-week dose of reality seems to be about right for my constitution, if
perhaps not the US Constitution....

But ... other than those two (and they're excellent), I mostly prefer queuing
up a set of related items, and working my way through them. Even with
podcasts, what I'm often aiming for is to string up a set of programmes or
episodes that I'm currently interested in listening to. My listening _doesn
't_ follow any particular schedule.

For YouTube or other downloadable content, the best solution is often to
simply download the material (and usually simply the audio), and to queue it
up on VLC.

(I've previously noted on HN that this is possible on Android if you install
the Termux and Termux-API aps, the termux-api shell tools, python, and via
pip, youtube-dl.)

The Android environment is still sufficiently fuxnored that for a long
playlist -- say, the 48 episodes, 30 minutes each, of David Christian's Big
History lectures -- your best bet is to download _everything_ first, then
queue up the set. It _isn 't_ possible to do the Linux equivalent of
constructing a playlist and running, say, mplayer over it:

    
    
        <playlist while read file; do mplayer "$file"; done
    

(Though it may be possible to construct a playlist file and run it.)

VLC _won 't_ directly stream YouTube or other online video content on Android.
So no dice setting up a playlist along those lines.

What's proved most annoying is that the software I've experimented with to
date _simply doesn 't retain or sustain specified lists_. Podcast Republic
allows items to be added to various lists ... but they vanish within seconds
(I've reported the bug). VLC allows queueing up of multiple items, but doesn't
really seem to sustain _that_ list very well. And trying to find and utilise
the playist files that do exist is ... awkward at best.

Beyond this, when playing content, the controls for managing playback ...
don't exist.

Mplayer is awesome on Linux as there are keyboard mappings to skip backwards
or forwards within a track, across tracks, speed up or slow down playback, or
pause. When I'm following a lecture, all of those are employed.

VLC offers none of this.

Podcast Republic has a GUI control to skip forward and backwards (15s) within
a track, which is quite useful. But there's no keyboard mapping.

Short of all of this: there's some truly amazing content out there. Tools for
accessing and programming it from a user's PoV are sorely lacking.

