At Home with John and Debbie

So this is one of the ways Adam Curry is looking to monetise his podcasting activities: selling Castblaster. I downloaded the trial beta and had a play. Most of the buttons don’t work, which I assume is an incompatibility with Windows 2000. That’s fine — it only claims to work on XP. It’s only inertia on my part that keeps me on 2000.

But, I can see how it’s meant to work, and frankly… well.. is that it? It’s an audio recorder with some buttons you can click to trigger sound effects or longer audio samples. I believe it applies some compression and automatically fades background sounds when you’re talking. It saves the result as MP3 with configurable ID3 tags. Here’s the killer: they want to charge $50 for a license.

The free, GPL, Audacity is an example of a vastly more powerful and featureful audio application that may well be worth $50 but you still get for nothing — and you’re free to change it however you like.

I appreciate this is an apples-to-oranges comparison — you couldn’t use Audacity alone to record a podcast live (at least, not in an elegant manner) — but Audacity proves that coding an audio application isn’t voodoo, and Castblaster is a very simple audio application.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 at 11:57 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.