Podcasts

Podcasts

I’m way way behind the curve on podcasts and I’m laying the blame firmly on my parents and their use of radio.

I grew up in a house where music was the backdrop to most activities – my first hearing of Appetite for Destruction? My Dad loaned the cassette from the library and I walked in as Welcome to the Jungle kicked off, epic! – so I never really had much of a view of things like the Shipping Forecast, radio plays and so on. I’m sure my parents did listen to ‘talk radio’ on occasion just not when I was around so I’ve always associated radio with music.

I won’t bore you with tales of recording the Top 10 to cassette, but my maturing musical tastes have mirrored my growing distaste for radio DJs and all the talking, yak yak yak they go, largely spouting nonsense and noise when all I really want is to listen to the music. So I’d turn off the radio and start listening to my own music; the rise of the MP3 made this approach all the more satisfying.

Of course the real problem wasn’t radio at all, but my choice of radio stations. Thank heavens for the internet I say, as I’ve many more ways to find music I like and, as the charts descended in mass produced pap… sorry, pop, I increasingly looked to the Pitchforks of the world to find new music. For quite a while I eschewed all radio as, wrongly, rubbish.

Recently that’s been changing as I’ve switched on (sorry!) to the richness and depth of talk radio, and whilst that’s largely been via Radio 4 at present, I’ve been enjoying the discussions, debates, and plays on offer. But how did I get here?

Bye Bye Radio

From tapes, to MiniDiscs, to CDs, I’ve spent countless hours creating playlists and recording it to the media of the moment. Where MP3s triumphed was speed, create a playlist on your computer and seconds later it’s copied to a USB stick. Roll forward a few years and, with all my music stored on my iPod, a quick sync was all it took to update several playlists and I had hours and hours of music at my fingertips.

An avid consumer of new music, I’d scour review sites and buy several new albums every fortnight or so, soon building a bank of new artists and albums (yes, I had a system for this to make sure everything got a good rotation).

So with my appetite for music being whetted elsewhere, and perhaps with my advancing years, I looked around for something a little less full-on for my morning commute.

Talk is cheap

Most mornings I’ll listen to the news as I drive to work, although it depends how much tolerance I have for whatever topic they are manhandling into a forced argument on any given day. Leaving work at odd hours to drive home (sometimes mid-afternoon, sometimes late evening) meant I was exposed to more of the planning and soon found I was getting drawn in and seeking out more alternatives.

Hello Podcasts

Podcasts are not new, I’ve listened to a few now and then but in the past, with my association for radio (which is still how I view podcasts oddly) being music, none of them ever stuck. Perhaps I was just listening to the wrong podcasts, god knows there are some awful ones out there but that’s the same for everything.

However, I was determined to find podcasts that work for me, so after a fair bit of digging I’ve not got a nice workable solution that gives me a selection of podcasts available to me on any of my Apple devices.

The latter part of that solution is provided by Downcast, a multi-device podcast app which syncs my playlists. It’s installed on my iPhone, my iPad, and both MacBooks, so if music isn’t cutting it I can get to many different podcasts and usually find something to keep my attention.

Admitedly some of my these aren’t strictly podcasts but recordings of radio shows but I’ve never really been one for following rules, all I know is that they are spoken word recordings that give me an option when the radio fails me and I’m not in the mood for music.

My current playlist includes:

Do you listen to podcasts? If so, any recommendations to share?

Comments

Comments are closed.