Podcast recommendations?

June 22, 2005 1:56 PM

Can anyone recommend some really good Podcasts?.

I know where to find the lists and even the top-ten(s) but they seem to be a terrible guide to quality. I'm stumbing around and nearly gave up, but amid all the drek there is occasional gold, like the WGBH Morning Stories or the BBC "From our own correspondent".

I appreciate everyone's idea of listening quality will vary, but taking those two as a guide, I'm looking for the podcasting equivalent of metafilter rather than slashdot or CNN or Fark. Any pointers?

posted by grahamwell to media & arts (21 answers total)

KRCW has great shows. I subscribe to about five of them.
posted by Mid at 1:59 PM on June 22, 2005

Mostly Trivia with Johnny Bee- one trivia question, every day or so. Very interesting.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 1:59 PM on June 22, 2005 [1 favorite]

Ack, KCRW. Sorry. Link works.
posted by Mid at 1:59 PM on June 22, 2005

Agree - the food program at KCRW is good, and I know far more about LA markets than a Londoner has a right to.

I also enjoy (sorry, no links, but they're easy to find):

- BBC documentaries feed (I think from the World Service)
- Grape Radio (on wine and winemaking)
- Living on Earth (for the earnest)
- Vatican Radio (on weekdays, usually 3 news stories daily, in depth)
- Eat Feed, and On Food

You can get Democracy Now! at archive.org, but I can't manage to stay on top of it and it's just piling up.

I think a number of weekly "magazines" must be about right. An hour a day is too much content. I look forward to some other responses for new ideas.
posted by sagwalla at 2:06 PM on June 22, 2005

I am enjoying the CBC Radio 3 weekly podcast. Canadian independent music, woo! (I just wish the host would stop saying "podcast" every 5th word podcast podcast).
posted by Capn at 2:08 PM on June 22, 2005

The CBC's wonderful science show, Quirks and Quarks. That and Coverville are the only podcasts I listen to with any regularity.
posted by dbarefoot at 2:25 PM on June 22, 2005

www.littlegraybooks.com has a small selection of podcasts of the live Little Gray Books Lecture Series, which are funnier than HELL.
posted by tristeza at 3:02 PM on June 22, 2005

I second the CBC suggestions.

And if I can piggyback a question... Jobs showed Podcasts built into iTunes at WWDC... Um, where? I can't find any such button and Help gets zero hits for it.
posted by dobbs at 3:25 PM on June 22, 2005

If you were a fan of TechTV's The Screen Savers before it got crappy, the old gang is doing a podcast called This Week in Tech (TWiT). I listen to that one, Quirks and Quarks, and Science Friday. Been meaning to check out the CBC Radio 3 but just haven't had time yet.
posted by matildaben at 3:45 PM on June 22, 2005

dobbs, that doesn't exist yet for consumers, but you can try BadApple.
posted by matildaben at 3:46 PM on June 22, 2005

(Hey, I inadvertently did not read your "MI" - sorry my post doesn't fit your criteria. My bad, I'm a doofus.)
posted by tristeza at 4:13 PM on June 22, 2005

Odeo launched their beta today. It's a kind of RSS feed for audiobloggers, so potentially it'll have...everything. Or nothing, depending on who is using it.
posted by cali at 4:36 PM on June 22, 2005

I try quite hard not to miss Phillip Adams on non-pod radio, and it's good that he's now available for downloading.

ABC Radio National is, in general, a Good Thing.
posted by flabdablet at 5:33 PM on June 22, 2005

I love dailysonic.com. Recent editions have included items on Alvin Lucier and microhouse. It's sort of high-brow geek music, plus they give you a round-up of world news headlines.
posted by tapeguy at 7:16 PM on June 22, 2005

I'll have to second This Week in Tech (TWiT), and add Leo Laporte's weekend radio programs that he podcasts a week later.

I'm also enjoying Scott Sigler's podcast novel EarthCore.
posted by nenequesadilla at 7:19 PM on June 22, 2005

I second Dailysonic (disclosure: they advertise on my blog). They are an irreverent Morning Edition.
posted by kickerofelves at 8:19 PM on June 22, 2005

I want to chime in on behalf of "From Our Own Correspondent." Fantastic show. I began recording it to MP3 years ago, pre-podcast era. Same for the ABC Radio National programming, especially "Night Air."

For me, admittedly a skeptic about podcasts from the start, the promise is still unfulfilled, so there are few good podcasts I can recommend. People and stations are offering only partial shows, or low quality sound, or they're chaning file-naming conventions on a regular basis (which breaks smart playlists), or they're coding their RSS feeds wrong (which can lead to the same file being automatically downloaded every day), or, most of all, they're just offering really awful shows. I DON'T WANT PODCASTS THAT SOUND LIKE COMMERCIAL RADIO. You can take your bumpers, breakers, fills, beds, sound machines, sample boards, station IDs, promos, lectures about listener constributions, and the yak-yak voice that nobody but dipshits on the radio has and shove it all. I've also got no interest in the mike-swallowing that sounds like what we did with a Panasonic tape recorder in 1983, nor the morning show drivel squeezed out of a used nappy, nor the hard-blowing of the same bigheads that taint the blogosphere.

So try back in a couple of years.
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:43 AM on June 23, 2005 [1 favorite]

Some of Mo Nickels' skepticism is warranted, but I've seen an improvement in the past couple of months and reckon the 'learning curve' is moving faster than 'a couple of years'. Will someone please tell the BBC?

Things that bug me about podcasts are the obvious nip-and-tuck post-recording edits, and too low a bandwidth. I've got iPodder set up to download podcasts at 4AM. I've got huge memory on my iPod. The last thing I want is someone scrimping on the bandwidth and recording some lo-fi talk show.

And I agree to some extent about the "same ol' same ol'" criticisms, but one of the best markets for podcasts has to be for timeshifting of the BBC (etc). Will someone please tell the BBC?

Sorry, I think the BBC are being content wusses about their trial.
posted by sagwalla at 10:43 AM on June 23, 2005

I have to agree with Mo here. I thought that I might be missing something. Thanks for the replies but on a quick survey, I don't think I am.

At least you have settled the confusion in my mind between KCRW and a 24 Hour Country Music Station of almost the same name. Oh and thanks for not mentioning Adam Curry.

On preview sagwalla, as an extreme example of the complaint you mention, have you sampled Newsweek on Air? It's truly bizzare, as if they have recorded it with a Casio Cassette recorder from a Shortwave Radio. The compression artefacts (I take it that is what I'm hearing - it sounds like crosstalk from Radio Moscow) are out of control, which is a shame, since the content is actually not bad.
posted by grahamwell at 10:59 AM on June 23, 2005

IMO, sort of bad form to ask everyone what their favorite is and then say: actually, no thanks, this sucks.
posted by Mid at 7:54 PM on June 23, 2005

Oh, and I thought I had worded it so nicely to avoid giving offence. My bad.

Anyway Itunes 4.9 is here and the world is turned upside down. A payment model for podcasting no less, that will get people thinking. In the meantime everything here is there (more or less), just so much prettier.
posted by grahamwell at 10:34 AM on June 28, 2005