How to Enhance Podcasts with ChapterToolMe

Podcasting, the audio offshoot of the weblogging craze, is already a household word for the tech-savvy crowd. Although this concept is but one year out of the gate, many in radio and television are already taking note and "podcast" was added to The Merriam Webster English Dictionary in 2005. As with any other new technology, the race is already on to innovate and make the most of the existing infrastructure within the podcasting world. Enter the enhanced podcast, equipped with chapters, pictures and links to the world wide web. Including all of these bells and whistles into a podcast might seem daunting, but thanks to handy shareware applications like ChapterToolMe, creating an enhanced podcast requires no more particular expertise than those necessary to create a plain old podcast in the first place.

At present, the necessary software to create enhanced podcasts is mac-only. Given the relative affordability of the mac mini, the excellent creative software available on that platform, and the likely arrival of a PC-based alternative soon, this should not be a problem for long. This article will assume that the reader has access to a mac running OS 10.3 or higher and QuickTime 7. ChapterToolMe is available for free download at http://www.rbsoftware.net and installs easily by following the usual prompts. Tip: Nothing special is necessary when recording and editing a podcast for enhancement.

Step #1: Once an .mp3 of your podcast is ready, open it in QuickTime. From the File Menu in QuickTime, "select Export..." (Apple-E) and select the option called "movie to mpeg4" from the export pull down menu at the bottom of the window. You may change the name of the file in the "save as" field at the top of the window. In this field, also change the file extension from ".mp4" to ".m4a" and hit the save button in the bottom right or just hit return. Exporting the file may take a few moments, depending on the size of the .mp3 file. Tip: It is usually a good idea to save your exported file to the desktop, since you'll need it handy for the next step.