I’ve got a gazillion other things to write about tonight, and I’ll probably get ’round to them before the night’s out, but I wanted to first write about podcasts.

Now, I’m (at times, and arguably) one of the sharper crayons in the box — not as sharp as that crazy crayon that’s been rotated incessantly inside the whirl-o-matic-o-sharpening on the back of the 64-pack, but not as dull as that crayon that practically requires a roach clip to be colored with in any meaningful fashion. But tonight, my ascent up Podcast Hill was more a downward spiral into Podcast Hell.

I’ve been wanting to take the audio tour material from my show at Framations, and turn it into a podcast. No real reason for doing that, other than the cool factor.

My first inclination was to use Garage Band, a part of iLife on my Mac. And while that looked reasonably easy, I had all kinds of trouble importing the sound files. I finally got them in, finished creating the silly podcast, only to find out….. my iPod won’t play it. It’ll start playing it, but the audio will die, the podcast continues on, and eventually the audio comes back for the next image. Weird.

Then I tried iMovie HD, which was a horrible tool for syncing audio tracks to still images. I don’t know what the deal was there, but that was just about the most frustrating thing I’ve tried on my Mac. I mean, I thought this podcast stuff was easy on a Mac….?

The final solution? Take my iMovie piece, export it as a QuickTime movie, then in QuickTime, export it as an iPod file. That seems to be working.

So now, should you care to take a listen, you can find the podcast for the show here. It’s an m4v file, so you’ll need to pull it to your desktop (for iTunes) or iPod before playing it. If you want to just watch the QuickTime version, it’s here.

Enjoy!