Entries tagged ‘odeo’

Odeo is the new online podcasting service which has been in the news for most of this year. A couple of days ago it opened it’s beta by means of invites – and before you ask: there’s no way to send out invites yourself. Just subscribe for an invite and hope for the best. Anyway, in this article I’ll provide an overview of the beta. The accompanying screenshots can be found on my Odeo Beta Overview photoset.

Odeo provides a very friendly atmosphere, heavily influenced by Flickr’s approach of tongue-in-the-cheek language. Just look at the sign-up page, for instance. Or the Terms of Use (cheers to Matthew Bischoff for that). And, to continue on the Flickr angle, they also have tags, profiles and contacts.

The podcasts are centered around channels to which you can subscribe. Actually there’s no talk about podcasts, the individual audio files are “shows”. You can tag channels, and there are also tags for shows, but (possibly due to a bug) I wasn’t allowed to tag shows.

Something else which isn’t possible is finding all shows and channels. I’d say this is the best way to explore Odeo, but unfortunately the closest thing to finding all channels is the Top 40. I definitely hope they fix this soon.

Aside from tags Odeo does a few other things which tie in well with the Web 2.0 spirit of open platforms. Odeo allows you to create a new channel by importing a syndication feed. If you’re a podcaster yourself this is the way to get your stuff on Odeo while preventing lock-in. You can also get a RSS feed for your subscription list, meaning you can use any program you want to download the shows to your listening device.

Speaking of downloading programs, Odeo provides one itself: the Odeo Syncr (more Flickr influences!). The app seems to work reasonably well: the shows are imported in iTunes just fine. However, after you’ve finished downloading you can’t exit the Syncr, it’ll show an error message. Proceed anyway and there’s another error message. Also after downloading the “Sync Now” option doesn’t seem to work anymore. Seems like the app freezes up after the downloads are done, but hey, it’s still a beta, right? (I’m using WinXP Pro SP1, by the way.)

The design of the Syncr itself is pretty interesting. It’s preferences are managed through the Odeo web app itself, not stored inside the Syncr. Also interesting is that it’s open source. In fact it’s built off the wonderful iPodder Lemon open source project.

You can let the Syncr download shows by adding them to your queue, though you can also download them via a direct link. The Syncr then downloads the shows from this queue. When you subscribe to a channel the first show of that channel is added to your queue. If you want to download all shows in the channel you have to add each show to the queue manually. A “add all shows in this channel to the queue” would be nice.

After each show has been downloaded it is added to your media player of choice. Well, right now only iTunes and Windows Media Player are supported, but at least you can choose. Additionally you can use the “auto” preference, which (I think) picks the default player for your system. There are some more settings, see this screenshot for more info.

The Syncr creates a new playlist which contains the shows downloaded from Odeo. From there on you should be able to do some interesting things using the Smart Playlists in iTunes, but unfortunately the metadata provided with the shows is lacking. For example I downloaded a few shows without artist / album metadata in the MP3 files, nor with a descriptive title. It’s very hard to figure out what’s what in this way, while Odeo could use the metadata from the creator’s account to populate these fields. It would also be very nice if they would embed the channel name in the file. That way it’d be easier to group channels (such as channels with free music downloads) together in a playlist.

And that concludes this overview of Odeo. Unfortunately the Create part of the side is not yet open, so I haven’t been able to review that. I’ll leave you with this pseudo-easter egg and hopefully I can write more about Odeo later (yeah, that’s a hint, you Odeo guys!).