Making a podcast can be a pain in the butt. Most of them are distributed via RSS or Atom, to make it as easy as possible for listeners to get new episodes. What if you want to save a bunch of audio as a podcast, but lack the technical expertise or the patience to make an RSS feed for it? Or what if you know how, but you just don't want to bother? Well, that's why there's Huffduffer.

Huffduffer will stitch audio files into a podcast for you, and put them into an RSS feed automatically. You can add your own styff, or throw together some of the great "inspiration" that's already on Huffduffer. They've linked some of the best free content on the web, like TED talks and This American Life. To make things even easier, there's a browser bookmarklet you can save, to easily Huffduff any interesting audio you run across. I'm already thinking of Huffduffer as the Tumblr of podcasting: good concept, great ease of use, definitely worth checking out.

If you hate Chrome like that fish from "Family Guy" hates guys in blue suits you won't want to join us on our premiere Download Squad Talkcast tonight at 9 pm Eastern (or 1 am GMT, 6 pm Pacific). We'll be talking Chrome, Google and browsers a-plenty.

We'll be using the Talkshoe client, which means you can either log in to their website, use their Java app or simply call in at (724) 444-7444 and enter call ID 25451. There's a message board for questions, and with an hour of call time we'll save the last half or so for questions. Later we'll distill this down into a convenient podcast, so if you miss it live you'll still get to listen at your convenience.

If you're as busy as rest of us, you may not have time to catch all the latest presidential election details on the evening news. Fortunately, you can still keep up by listening to a few really excellent podcasts while you're commuting or working out. [Note: All links open in iTunes.]

Listen to selected speeches from the Democratic National Convention in a podcast series put together by the DNC. It's got all the usual suspects like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but you can also catch speeches given by Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and some of the governors in attendance.

The Republican National Convention will also have speeches available as the event gets underway today in Minnesota.

For a general overview of what's happening with the election, have a listen to National Public Radio's "It's All Politics," a weekly podcast covering news and events in the presidential race. If it's political punditry you're after, choose from Bill Maher, Dan Carlin, Bill Moyers, and others.

Download Pod is an occasional series about our favorite podcasts. If you have suggestions for podcasts you think we should check out, let us know in the comments or via our tips page.

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art 486s and bleeding edge Pentium I computers, and signed on with AOL or Compuserve or Mindspring to fire up Netscape, stumble on to Yahoo! only to discover the truth.

Even back then, there was a lot of stuff online that was technically information or visual/audible media. It was free, much of it, anyway, as well. I spent way too many hours watching an oddity called a webcam update at shockingly fast one minute intervals, as it delivered grainy black and white stlll images of some forgotten webmaster's painted turtle in California to my desktop in Northern Virginia.

As far as exotic, fine art work or rare, priceless tomes of great knowledge went -- it wasn't all accessible online, or necessarly free if it happened to be available. But for a good portion of the '90s, people who hadn't been online much, or were in denial, insisted it was out there.

There dawns the new century, and the myth of "it's all there, free" started to fade away with the old beige Pentium I and II computers. Things went the other way, though. Every day there was more information on the internet from all sorts of sources, and some of it (shock, awe) was free, or at least accessible to some degree. Is it irony or karma? Who knows? Many people are floored, now, to discover how much useful, cool, credible information is available online free of charge.

So just in time to go back to school (or to impress your friends with your innate intelligence), I've found a few sites and tricks for getting really great information online without additional tuition fees.

We've always been fond of Amarok. It has some good features, nice add-ons, and felt just a little friendlier than some other Linux media players. We recently discovered a contender to the title of most loved Linux media player, the ominously named Banshee. Fortunately, Banshee doesn't involve listening to shrieking demons, unless that's your genre of choice.

It's an application that has been increasingly packaged with distributions that include GNOME as the default desktop. For those distributions that don't include it on a standard install, it's almost always available from a repository. Many of those repositories include, at present, Banshee's 0.13.3 version. This is the stable version of Banshee and shows loads of promise, but it isn't quite Amarok.

We recommend, if possible, hunting down packages for your distro of choice of the latest version of Banshee (0.99.2). If there are no packages available, try installing the newer version via Subversion. It takes a bit more time, but it is well worth the effort.

Why? Because Banshee 0.99.2 (or alternately, Banshee 1.0 Beta 2) is an almost completely different screamin' demon. It may be a beta version, and not without its bugs, but it works much more smoothly than the 0.13.3 install we were using previously on Hardy Heron.

BlogAmp is a service that generates embeddable podcasts for your blog. BlogAmp calls them audiocasts, to include both streaming and downloadable 'casts, but we'll stick with "podcasts." Those were streaming too, last we heard. BlogAmp basically handles the generation of your podcast from start to finish: uploading, creating an embedded player, and creating an RSS feed.

BlogAmp's business model seems to be based on selling storage space. For a fee, you can upload your mp3 files -- support for other formats would be a plus! -- and avoid the need for other hosting. If you've already got plenty of storage space on another server (the server that hosts your blog, for example), you can use BlogAmp's other features for free. Some of these are cool: you can reskin the player a little bit and add download links for the individual mp3s in your list. Some of them are a little bit obnoxious: do we really want to make it easier to add "e-commerce" links to a podcast player?

If you know how to put together a podcast, but you're having trouble creating an RSS feed or finding a way to play it from your blog, BlogAmp could be a useful tool. For veterans of audio on the web, there's probably nothing here you can't already do yourself and customize more carefully.

Last time we told you about a science podcast that was all about getting to the truth, now let's look at a podcast that covers the other side of science. Escape Pod is a weekly short story podcast hosted by Stephen Eley released every Thursday. The three-year-old podcast will stretch your mind with all types of sci-fi including space, time, technology, hard science, and even weird psychological science fiction. Each episode features some of the best science fiction from the present and the past with some stories from the great digests being read as well as this years Hugo nominees.

All stories come with an introduction that helps guide the listener into the work and gives fair warning to parents about the content of the work. Each episode even carries a rating similar to movies (G to R) to help determine whether you want your kids to listen. This week's PG episode features a 2008 Hugo nominee that was published in Asimov's Science Fiction short story magazine last year. The story took our minds on an Outer Limits type journey that included a main character living out the end of his life and discovering someone who may have been the reincarnation of someone very close to him.

Escape Pod is part of a network of short story podcasts including the horror podcast, Pseudopod, and the fantasy podcast, PodCastle.

Download Pod is an occasional series about our favorite podcasts. If you have suggestions for podcasts you think we should check out, let us know in the comments or via our tips page.

We'd never, ever turn down a good ghost story. Aliens, even the abducting kind (especially the abducting kind!) are incredibly cool. Still, we are pretty sure that T. Rex existed and didn't use those huge incisors for gnashing hellaciously into cantaloupes and mangoes. And we have enough acquaintances who act a little too similarly to lower primates to believe Darwin was too terribly far off.

We really dig people who can talk about the Drake Equation. We dig people who can speak articulately about science, sound extra intelligent, and still be accessible enough that we are able to follow along.

Feel the same? Check out The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. The weekly podcast is produced by the New England Skeptical Society and the James Randi Educational Foundation. Each week the panel takes on news from fringe science and takes a scientific look at controversial issues from a number of scientific fields.

Scientific podcasts are a funny thing. There are many out there that remind us way too much of our college days when we sat for two or three hours in a hot lecture hall listening to a professor full of even hotter air drone on about weather patterns. But there are gems like The Skeptic's Guide, which feel much more like you're sitting a table in a restaurant having a conversation with your smartest friends.

And these guys (and girls!) are smart. The host, Dr. Stephen Novella, is a neurologist teaching at Yale Medical School. Rebecca Watson is the resident Skepchick on the panel, and has the unique claim to fame that there's an asteroid named after her. Jay and Robert Novella are regular contributors and leaders in the New England Skeptical Society. And the weekly guest, James Randi, is the most interesting of the bunch: He's a magician. He's a world famous escape artist. And he's ready to expose, explain, and share with the layman the very scientific explanations for the magical things that go on in the paranormal and pseudoscientific world.

The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is available from their site, or through iTunes.

If the idea of four Brits talking smack about open source, Creative Commons, and each other appeals to you, then you'll love LugRadio Live. In its fifth season, the Fab Four - Jono Bacon (of Ubuntu fame), Stuart 'Aq' Langridger, Chris Procter, and Adam Sweet -- produce regular podcasts that touch on all aspects of open source. While the Four Large Gents may be a bit irreverent (not always safe to listen to at work), they are always entertaining and fun.

Always a popular show, it gained increased attention after the first LugRadio Live UK event in 2005. Billed as a "rock conference," the two-day show blends presentations from many widely-recognized names in the open source community, along with great music.

This year, LugRadio Live UK will get underway July 19-20 in Wolverhampton, UK, and the the first ever LugRadio Live US will be held in San Francisco, CA, April 12-13. Amazingly, tickets are only $10 bucks (£5 for the UK show). We caught up with Bacon to get the inside scoop on why to go, how to win t-shirts, and gong-a-thongs.

Want to start a podcast, but don't know the first thing about audio engineering, web hosting, or RSS feeds? Blogtalkradio's newest service makes podcasting a cinch, which is probably why they call the service Cinch.

All you have to do is a call 646-200-0000 from any phone and start talking. Cinch will record your conversation and create a feed with your call as an MP3 enclosure. You never even need to visit the Cinch web page or sign up for the service. So how do you find your feed? Simple, just add your phone number to the end of the Cinch URL. For example, if your phone number is 555-253-4756, your feed would be published at http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/5552534756.

Now, the audio quality isn't going to be amazing. We're talking about recording telephone calls here, after all. If you're serious about podcasting, you're going to want to get a decent microphone, some audio editing software, and so forth. But if you just want to record short interviews on the go and you don't have any other equipment handy, Cinch could be a lifesaver.

And if you're worried about sharing your phone number with the general public through the URL, you can always use FeedBurner to republish your feed with a different URL.

[via Scripting News]

Whether you're recording a podcast, a Squadcast, or anything in between it can sometimes be difficult to remember what you were trying to say once a video camera starts rolling. CuePrompter is free online teleprompter service that allows you to turn your computers web browser into a teleprompter of sorts and keep yourself on track while you're recording your next masterpiece.

Using CuePrompter is pretty easy: all you need to do is copy and paste your script in a box on the site and then "Start Prompter." CuePrompter then launches in a new window with you text and you're a play button away from teleprompter bliss. You can customize CuePrompter for your needs by choosing between a small screen size (good if you're using your computers webcam) or a big screen size (good if you've got a camcorder set up across the room) as well as a small or big font size depending on your situation and eyesight capabilities. The prompter has nine different speeds, can be made full-screen, viewed in normal or mirrored mode, and can be played backwards.

Each prompter session is limited to 2000 characters and requires you to be running MS Internet Explorer 5.0 or above and MS Windows XP, 2000, or 2003 to work properly. We tested it out using Firefox on a Mac and only ran into problems using the mirror and full-screen mode. CuePrompter also seemed to have some minor issue translating apostrophes. One thing that definitely makes CuePrompter different than regular prompters however is you have no way to really control the prompter once its started beyond simple starting and stopping, so once you start CuePrompter you better be ready to go.

[via EmilyChang]

Podcasts are unruly things. There are millions of them out there, and only a small percentage interest you. An even smaller percentage are actually worth listening to. You've got to search them out, add them to your aggregator, or download them to your computer or device. Not particularly difficult, but not particularly convenient, either.

We've taken some time to play with the Mediafly podcast/vodcast search and delivery service. We'd describe Mediafly as part search engine, part social network, part delivery service, with a healthy dose of Amazon-esque recommendation thrown in. It's still in beta, and where there's definitely some work left to be done, it's shaping up to be a service with promise.

Describing Mediafly is hard. Using it is considerably easier.

Podcasting might not be easy, but it isn't as hard as you think. Christina and Grant catch up with Amber Rhea to talk about the benefits of starting your own podcast.

Not into this whole "creation of new media" thing? Only want to listen? We offer a few tips for getting started as a podcast listener, too!

The Squadcast's "The Five" this week features Download Squad's five favorite podcast tools, sites and tricks.

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Take the jump for show notes and links to items discussed in this episode.

We thought the provisions in the WIPO broadcast treaty which would add a layer of intellectual property rights were kaput, over, dead-as-a-doornail. Wrong. In May a new version of the treaty was introduced and, contrary to widespread belief about the changes which had been planned, language still exists in the WIPO treat which -- if passed -- would create a brave new world of copyright madness.

As currently written, the treaty would remove fair use rights on things like excerpts of television and radio broadcasts for the purpose of explanation, examination or critical commentary; something even the DMCA hasn't torn asunder.

Also at stake is your PC, the all purpose content creation device in front of which you currently sit. Signatory countries -- which include the "G8" -- would be required to enact legal protections for content which could easily mean that your PC's feature list falls squarely under the control of government, rather than innovative developers. This part of the treaty would stifle new technology in distribution and throw a giant wet blanket on indie content producers.

Sign this online petition and help play a small part in making sure your PC's future remains free.

It's been an interesting year so far for operating systems. Microsoft released its first major upgrade in 5 years with Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux continued on its way toward world domination with the release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Even Michael Dell's running it on his home computer (and shipping it on yours).

With that in mind, we bring you the first in a limited edition Download Squad Podcast. Collect them all. Trade them with your friends. Today we speak with Download Squad's Grant Robertson and Alex Hung, two guys with a boatload of Windows and Mac experience who have been trying out Ubuntu Linux.