Now, this week is leading to International Podcast Day. So to get everybody ready I want to help you download your first podcast, or Help you download and listen to the Relaxed Male Podcast.
There are several ways you can consume a podcast. There are streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. Then there are podcast players. These are sometimes called podcatchers.
The biggest difference between podcast players and podcast streamers is what you get to listen to.
A podcast streamer like Spotify and Pandora can choose to not allow an episode to be on their platform. While a podcatcher is able to play every episode a podcast puts out. That is because a podcast player downloads each new episode as they come out.
So if I chose to do an episode that had a contraverial guest, say Alex Jones, you wouldn’t get to hear it on Spotify. They block those episodes. Yet you would get to listen to that episode if you had my show on Google Podcasts
As you can see I like podcast players more than streamers because I can choose what I want to listen to.
How do podcasts work?
Podcasts are very easy to understand. The producer of a podcasts record the audio or video or writes a PDF and uploads it to a hosting server. Then When the show is published either the hosting server or the blogging software that is used creates an addition to a special podcast specific page called an RSS feed. If you try to look at the RSS feed through some browsers like Google Chrome all you see is a bunch of code and it looks broken. Yet that RSS feed is just fine. Other browsers like Firefox will actually format the RSS XML code so that it is readable by normal people.
When an RSS feed is updated The episode is then available to be downloaded by a podcatcher. If it is a streaming service then a copy of the episode of moved to the streaming services servers for people to listen to.
Android
There are several podcast listening apps listed in the Google Play store. There are some really good ones like Pocketcasts. this is my favorite podcast player for Android At one time it would have cost around $5 to download but they have gone to a freemium service. Google Podcasts App is also a great app to use also but doesn’t have some of the features that pocketcasts has.
If you would like more information on how to use Google Podcasts App they have a well-written support page here.
iOS
For the iOS platform, there are also many great podcast players out there but my personal favorite is Overcast. Sadly it is an oOS only app but is has some of the most original and useful features of any podcast player out there. The munber on is the Smart Speed. This has so far saved me over 696 hours of listening. Smart speed is basically truncating Silence that shows up in the show.
There are also apps like the Apple Podcasts App which comes preinstalled on your iPhone and iPads. This is a great beginners app but lacks many of the features that Overcast has.
So There you have it you can also subscribe to The Relaxed Male by going to the Subscribe page on this site and I have made it as easy as possible for you to find your favorite app and just click the corresponding image and it will pull up that the Relaxed Male Page on that app. Enjoy and thanks for listening.
