Podcasting with AudioBoo in 3 Steps

AudioBoo (website) is an application on the iPhone that enables you to record short, 5 minute audioclips and publish them on the web. It’s like Twitter, but with audio instead of text. In this post, I will show you you can use AudioBoo to produce several different podcast series.

The moment I heard about AudioBoo on MacBreak Weekly, I fell in love with the concept. I started my podcast ‘career’ with live audio recordings from Saint Peter’s Square, but they required a digital recorder and lots of post-processing to edit the audio and post it to the web.

It could sometimes take days, if not weeks, to get this audio content to my audience.

With AudioBoo, I can share audio impressions of events in my life without the hassle of post-production. I can record something, post it to the web via my iPhone, and share it with the world minutes after I record it!

What’s more, AudioBoo makes your updates available in an RSS feed that people can subscribe to in iTunes, so that they can download them automatically.

The short form (5 minutes max) is ideal for a number of podcast series that I produce, like ‘Healthy Catholic’, where I share my tips on how to live a healthy life.

But all these updates end up in the same RSS feed. So how could I use AudioBoo to record podcasts and have them automatically being added to the various podcast series that I produce?

Step 1: use tags

When you create an AudioBoo, you can add tags to each recordings. This is the cornerstone of the method I developed to distribute the recordings. For a recording that I want to be inserted into my ‘Healthy Catholic’ feed, I add the tag ‘HC’. For an update for Catholic Insider, I add the tag ‘CI’.

Step 2: use Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is a service that enables you to analyze, modify and recompile web content and RSS feeds. It offers very advanced options, and might be a little overwhelming at first, but it’s not as hard as it sounds.

In my case, I wanted to add new Healthy Catholic AudioBoos to an already existing RSS feed.

So I created two ‘Fetch Feed’ modules that will be merged into one new feed: the existing Healthy Catholic feed and the general AudioBoo feed.

I only want the items in the AudioBoo feed that are tagged ‘HC’, because the other recordings are for other shows. So I have to create a filter, that permits all posts that contain the iTunes keyword ‘HC’.

(For advanced users: I also added a Regex filter to replace the generic AudioBoo description, summary, author and subtitle by other texts).

I also had to create another filter to actively block all items that do not contain the iTunes keyword ‘HC’.

The result of that filtering is a feed that only contains my AudioBoos tagged with ‘HC’. Using a ‘union’ module, I merge those results with the original Healthy Catholic feed.

And finally, I updated my Feedburner feed (that people subscribe to in iTunes and on SQPN.com) to get its information from the Pipe Output.

And voilà: the subscribers to Healthy Catholic now receive updates produced with AudioBoo and the updates that are produced and posted in the ‘old-fashioned’ way!

I can repeat the process for any other show that I want to produce with AudioBoo; I could create a new pipe for ‘CI’/Catholic Insider updates, ‘DB’ for mini Daily Breakfast episodes, etc.

Step 3

There is no step 3!

P.S.: you might have noticed that I use jingles in some of my AudioBoo episodes. No magic tricks here: I just play them over my computer speakers and record them on the spot