March 17: Earlier in the month, we told you about the Music That Matters podcast from Seattle’s great public radio station, KEXP. Another KEXP offering that we thought deserves a mention during Podcasting News’ 31 Days of Free Music is their excellent podcast Live Performances.

The weekly podcast features live sets from a wide range of bands, including up-and-coming acts, like Austin’s freaky Ghostland Observatory and Philly’s Dr. Dog, as well as older indie favorites, like Belle and Sebastian and Billy Bragg. Music is interspersed with talk with the band members.

Most of the weekly podcasts originate from KEXP’s Seattle studios, but several times a year, the KEXP staff travel to New York, Chicago, and events like the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, to record batches of live performances.

Now matter where you live, podcast like this let you learn about hot bands that you might not otherwise be exposed to.

Princeton is making audio recordings of public lecturesavailable in podcast form on its WebMedia site. The archive contains over 800 files dating back to 1998 and includes lectures by many prominent guests.

Streaming videos of campus events have been publicly available through the Princeton WebMedia website for years, but the University wants to “leverage the technology” of podcasts to make the lectures more easily accessible, Office of Information Technology (OIT) director of academic services Serge Goldstein said.

The lecture videos “don’t have as broad an audience as they could or should have,” he said. The video files can’t be saved, but the podcasts can be downloaded onto computers and then loaded onto iPod or other portable devices.

The videos and podcasts are meant to benefit the public more than students and faculty, Goldstein said. “I think the bulk of the people interested in this material will be people outside of the University,” he said. “It’s not primarily targeted at students per se.”

via Daily Princetonian,

March 16: We’re on the downhill side of 31 Days of Free Music month at Podcasting News.

We’ve talked about free guitar music, free classical music, free dj mixes, free hip-hop and even some brutal, unrelenting noise.

Somehow, though, we missed bagpipes and gypsys.

The Renaissance Festival podcast features Celtic music, Irish folk music, Scottish bagpipes, English folk, Gypsy music, and Renaissance tunes. You might even hear some inappropriate bawdy holiday songs along the way.

You can preview a recent episode, below, or subscribe to the show by adding this URL to your podcast client:
http://renaissancefestivalmusic.com/RenFestPodcast.rss

A new service lets YouTube viewers see content that has been deleted from the site. Delutube can serve up video clips even after YouTube has purged them.

So, even if your favorite MTV videos have been deleted by YouTube, you may still be able to watch them in all their YouTube-branded glory.
Delutube allows visitors to enter the video ID (pulled from the end of the YouTube URL) of a deleted clip, then attempts to retrieve the clip from YouTube’s system. Clips are not apparently deleted from YouTube’s database at the moment they are taken down (or they at least persist in YouTube’s cache before being cleared), allowing Delutube a chance of retrieving them. The site also allows for the easy downloading of clips.

The service’s current convoluted interface will limit its impact, but it could make YouTube’s network an easy way to share and download files that will quickly be pulled from the public portion of the site. It’s also the sort of thing likely to cause even more angst among content owners, especially if visitors can still retrieve clips that have been the target of DMCA takedown notices.

via Ars Technica

March 15: We’re halfway through 31 Days of Free Music month at Podcasting News. We’ve got couple more gigs of free music to write about – so, check out the day’s free podcast, subscribe to the ones you like, and get ready to blow out your hard drive.

If you’re familiar with Rhino Records, you’ll know that they specialize in obsessive reissues of classic pop music. Rhino’s Rhinocast podcast is a just-as-obsessive exploration of classic pop, ranging from James Taylor to Ry Cooder to Bad Company to The Beach Boys.

The podcasts feature great pop music, in-depth discussion of the musicians and music, and interviews with musicians like Chrissy Hynde and Burt Bacharach.

A recent Rhinocast, below, looked at the music of Madonna.

You can subscribe to the Rhinocast by adding this URL to your podcast software:
http://www.rhino.com/rhinocast.rss

Slacker has announced a new Personal Radio service that lets U.S. consumers create customized stations and listen to them on the computer or with a Slacker portable media player.

The service lets is an Internet radio service that lets you create personalized radio stations. They plan to offer wireless Slacker portable media players that will effectively make your custom radio stations portable. The device will download a selection of content and advertising from Slacker, and you will be able to listen to it anywhere you like.

While the Slacker is being called an “iPod-killer”, the services’ limitations could severely limit interest.

• The service forces you to listen a selection of music based on who they’ve cut deals with.
• The service is ad-supported, like radio, but the cost for players is comparable to iPods and other portable media players that let you avoid advertising.
• If you don’t like Slacker’s choices, you can skip tracks. You can only skip six tracks in an hour, though, which means that most of the time you’ll be listening to the tracks that they want you to hear, or advertising.
• The value of the device depends on the success of Slacker’s service.

Based on these limitations, the Slacker does not look like it has a hope of being an “ipod-killer”. It could be the Zune-killer, though…..

March 14: It‚Äôs 31 Days of Free Music month at Podcasting News. We hope you’re not running out of space on your computer or MP3 player, because we keep finding cool free music podcasts to share!

Yesterday, we looked at the sturm un drang of Beethoven’s symphonies. Today, we’ve got something a little less intense.

The Acousticity podcast features free acoustic music, straight up, no B.S. Featured tracks are by a wide variety of artists, and range from stripped-down guitar and vocal performances to amazing instrumentals.

An example of the music you’ll hear on the Acousticity podcast is Josh Pinkham’s Fisher’s Hornpipe. You can preview this below, or subscribe to the podcast by adding this URL to your podcasting software:
http://www.garageband.com/user/Barberman/podcast/main.xml

If you’ve got a free music podcast, let us know on the index page for 31 Days of Free Music!

Image: pinkbelt

Popular video blogger Ze Frank is planning to end his show this week. Frank’s final episode will air on March 17, 2007.Launched in March 2006 as a one-year project, The Show with Ze Frank takes the form of a conversation between the host, Ze Frank, and the show’s audience of “sports racers.” Together they discuss news, politics and technology while collaborating on massive group projects.

Frank has also moved his archives to blip.tv, and partnered with the company to incorporate his Gimme some Candy program as part of blip.tv’s services. Gimme Some Candy lets any viewer of a show purchase space alongside videos to run personal messages.

Later in 2007, Frank plans to produce and star in other Web and video projects, which are expected to have blip.tv components.

“The relationship I have with my audience is extremely important to me and a big part of maintaining that bond is ensuring the best viewing experience each and every time they watch an episode,” said Ze Frank. “I’m very excited that we’re continuing to prove that independent content creators can survive and thrive with brand advertising.”

If you weren’t able to attend this year’s SXSW conference, you can listen to highlights from the event with the SXSW podcast.

The podcast features audio of sessions like Sex and Computational Computing, Dan Rather’s Keynote and Five Tips To Make Your Lame Podcast Listenable.

You can preview the podcast below, or subscribe to it by adding this URL to your podcast client:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SXSWpodcasts

Media conglomerate Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion dollars, arguing that YouTube’s business is built on ripping off other people’s work:

“YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.”

A lot of new media pundits are weighing in on the controversy, most of them arguing that Viacom is insane or evil:

• TechCrunch & Techmeme compare Viacom to Dr. Evil
• BuzzMachine calls the suit “boneheaded“, adding “They are trying to spread stupid.”
• IP Democracy calls the suit “fluffy“.

While many bloggers are supporting Google in this spat between media conglomerates, history is likely to prove them wrong.

Viacom protecting its rights as a content creator, and in doing so, may help protect the rights of bloggers, podcasters and video podcasters around the world.