So one of the big stories I noticed this week was the release of Adobe’s media player. It looks slick, but what does it mean for podcasters? Well, Wizzard digs it, and we all know Wizzard is the lastest hot stuff in the podcasting industry. We had a look at it as well because we are working on some player ideas. Let me steal a rant from our CTO, Lewis Sobotkiewicz, who doesn’t think it means much to us podcasters:

…It looks like they’re focusing heavily on video, not so much on audio. It can’t load .AVI or .MPG files off of my hard drive, which is what all my personal videos are encoded as. I’ve read on the net that it can’t play back H.264+AAC files. That would be unfortunate for podcasters because that’s how video podcasts are encoded. Podcasters aren’t going to spend the extra $400 to buy Flash so they can encode as .FLV.

I have no idea where downloaded episodes are saved. They go to some mysterious folder on my hard drive, and I have no idea how to get rid of them.

And yes, their interface is very slick and easy to use. I, like everyone, love crossfading transitions, but that’s not enough to convince me to download this thing so I can watch 3 episode of CSI New York. That’s the only thing they seem to be adding to the already full media player bandwagon. My impression is that Adobe has a lot of work to do before this gets widespread adoption.

So there you have it. Maybe it’s not all that hot if you’re a podcaster. It was just released the other day though, so we’ll see how it pans out for us.

So it looks like iTunes is officially the biggest music retailer in the US now. I came across this on Podcasting News
today, after a week of browsing headlines about online music stores and potential online music stores (or social networks that sell music). This is pretty big news in my opinion, and really says a lot about how much the Internet has changed the world. I think back 10 years ago to my graduating year, with fond memories of cutting class to go fetch the latest from my favorite band. I remember picking eagerly at the shrink wrapping, carefully pulling out the liner notes so as not to rip them on the jewel case edges, and listening to CDs from start to finish. It seems so ancient now, but it’s not. That was just 1998. Who would have guessed back then that a computer company would be the number one music retailer?

I’ve been noticing a lot of online services popping up that allow you to create a mixtape of your favorite songs. Here’s two posts by Mashable alone just this week:

Muxtape. The Simplest Mixtape Service Yet.
Mixwit’s Simple Mixtape Service
This idea of mixing media content online and forming playlists seem to be a growing trend. DailySplice is also, in a way, a mixtape creator… only we focus on podcasts mixes rather than music.

Here’s a story I found really interesting this week in the blogosphere. It suggests iTunes could end up loosing the music battle to MySpace.

Read it on Read/Write Web