Q: What happened to the iLounge Week in Review podcasts? I loved listening to them every week, and now they’re gone without a trace. Will they be coming back?
A: You can still find our past editions here. There were three main reasons we decided to discontinue the iLounge Week in Review podcasts late last year – traffic, time, and value. At its peak, our podcast ranked 8th in the United States on the iTunes Music Store – this even surprised us – and similarly in the U.K. version of iTMS.
Yet the total number of listeners at that point was in the single-digit thousands, which was clearly better than zero, but not enough to justify the time and effort that went into every week’s edition.
Behind the scenes, production was very problematic. We tried a variety of different software tools to produce our shows, which were being recorded via an overseas audio connection between iLounge’s U.S.- and U.K.-based staff. The connections were highly unreliable, and the tools had an amazing tendency to crash and lose most or all of our recordings – often after we’d finished doing the entire podcast.
So a single half-hour show sometimes was recorded three times, interrupted by international telecom issues, and then edited for another hour or two. As much as we enjoyed doing a podcast on the first take, we tired of having to repeat everything over and over, and losing everything with such frequency.
Several weeks ago, we tried to use the Podcast Studio feature of Apple’s latest Garageband to produce a short podcast introduction to the iTalkPro voice recorder samples we placed online. We were blown away with the program’s ease of use and results, creating a recording that explained pretty much everything above, then led into the audio samples.
