Paul's Blog

It's already January of 2007, and I have yet to see someone who has created a "Chapter Tool" for Podcasts (basically, for iTunes/iPod users) that runs on Windows. I'm truly confused by this. I mean, a company comes up with a thread of some thought of an idea, and in three days some code-junkie has this thing written, running, and selling it; only to have it cracked in another two hours! So, what's the hold up on the Chapter Tool for Windows?

I haven't done my own Podcast in a while, but I host a site for kids to do their own Podcasts. I would love to be able to tell them how to have their Podcasts produced like a pro, but unless you have a Mac (which most of them don't), they can't do this cool thing to their 'casts.

Now, of all of the great podcasting (and total tech-junkies) out there, Kevin and James should have stumbled on this by now. ;) I've seen specs on Wikipedia for how the format looks, but seriously, I'm not going to painfully hand-code XML and sliding through my audio files to find index times for each chapter. Even MAKE magazine hasn't gotten this worked out in a software form.

By now, I would have thought that the great Sony would have managed to include this simple feature into their ACID 6.0 product as an update. I just downloaded the latest version (6.0d) and it doesn't seem to support it, yet. Maybe they're a little behind with this, or maybe they're coming up with their own BetaMax version of it, or something... I don't know. The truth is, this should be a simple, free, tool for people to use to create their Podcasts with chapter indexes. Like an add-on for Audacity or something.

I've been following this issue for something like 15 months and I haven't seen anything, yet. Maybe I'm just not that good at "the Google," or I'm too impatient to sift through the five-hundred-million results, but I'm coming up empty.

So, if anyone is out there reading this... Clue me in!