iPod, mp3 player, podcasting, readers????? I want to download sermons and half hour programs that were originally on the radio and are podcasted on the Internet. I want to listen to them on something portable. What do I need? iPod, mp3 player, podcast reader.......? And how does that all work?

I'm old school; I don't know the cheapest or easiest way to accomplish your end but here’s what I do. I record 3 hours of talk radio Monday-Friday using Total Recorder the software cost $17.95 for the standard edition. Here's the link; http://www.highcriteria.com/ The audio from the streaming radio station is in a WAVE format. Using Total Recorder I encode it to a MP3 format and save it to a file. I then copy the MP3 file to a CD-RW for playing on a cheap MP3 player [almost all portable CD players these days play MP3 formats – check before you purchase]. MP3 is a compression format. The compression is referred to as Bit Rate. If your encoding/recording [compressing] music you want a high bit rate, gives better quality play back closest to the original media. However, the higher the Bit Rate the larger the file will be. For spoken word/talk radio there is really no concern for quality play back. My settings are; ABR 128kbit/s, 44100hz Stereo This will give you a file size of 153MB equaling 3 hours of streaming audio. When you copy the file to a CD-RW you can get about 12 hours of stream on one disc. The disc size is 700MB. The Total Recorder Standard Edition comes with a number of compression formats [encoders] to choose from. I've been using MP3 Dll with encoding properties; Ogg Vorbis for MP3 Lame only. TRSE is very versatile; you can record using a microphone, a CD, a cassette, a DVD, the TV, stream, just about anything you can plug into your computer. It's got tons of extras, which lets you edit you recordings, add to tracks and do all kinds of neat stuff. I'm not familiar with current market encoders/recorders, I been using TRSE for about five or six years. I like it and for me it’s easy I am not familiar with Podcast. I would think that the Podcast format is a file that you down load. If that’s the case, maybe all you need to do is down load the Podcast file, save it, then copy it to a CD-RW. I’m only guessing here. Hope this helps.

Podcasts are simply audio files offered through RSS feeds to automatically download the content to your machine when new content is posted. There are many ways to skin a cat. You need an RSS news feed type software capable of downloading the audio content. The most popular and easy to use is probably Itunes, but there are plenty of others as well that are free. Itunes also has a directory of Podcasts that can be added very easily right from the Itunes store (they're still usually free), so if the podcasts you want to hear is in their directory, it's really easy to get subscribed to them. Once the content is downloaded, you can burn it on CD, put it on a portable media device such as an MP3 player. If you are using Itunes, an IPod/Nano/Shuffle would be the easiest portable device obviously. The important things to check are... 1. What file format are the podcasts in? MP3? Ogg Vorgis? M4A? WMA? 2. Choose an RSS feed and content library management client that is compatible with that format. For example, if the podcast is in WMA, then Itunes would be a bad choice. 3. Choose a portable player that is compatible with the client software you want to use to manage your media. For example, don't buy Microsoft's Zune player if you want to use ITunes. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina! www.redcross.org