Podcasts Explained
A podcast is like a subscription for home delivery of your newspaper. It allows your computer to retrieve new digital audio recordings automatically, soon after they're published. After you subscribe to the St. Aidan's podcast, your computer checks for new sermon recordings every day, and it can download the file while you sleep. Later, at your convenience, you can sit at the computer and listen to it, or transfer it to your MP3 player or iPod and listen to it on the go.
The name "podcast" comes from "iPod" and "broadcast". St. Aidan's podcast, like many podcasts today, is compatible with any MP3 player, not just an Apple iPod, and is free. For more information, you may find the Podcasting article at Wikipedia helpful.
How To Get This Podcast
First you must choose your podcast receiving software ("podcatcher"). Many people choose the commercial Apple iTunes software because it works closely with the Apple iPod; after it's installed, just click on the following link to add the St. Aidan's podcast to iTunes. You may prefer another podcatcher, especially if you have a non-iPod player. See http://www.podcatchermatrix.org to help you choose among them. For any of these podcatchers, in the course of adding a subscription, it will ask you for the URL or link to the podcast. For the St. Aidan's podcast, you should copy this URL and paste it into the podcatcher: http://feeds.feedburner.com/StAidans-Boulder (compatible with both Atom and RSS formats).
Just a heads up: After you subscribe, your podcatcher may immediately begin to download every sermon in the St. Aidan's archive. This would mean a lot of megabytes of recordings, tying up your internet connection for a while. Nothing worse than that will happen, and you may like this idea. But if not, there's usually a way to interrupt these downloads after they begin, or prevent it in advance by changing the podcatcher's preferences (e.g. tell it to get only the latest recording). A little advance research will ease you over this initial hump; forewarned is forearmed.
St. Aidan's Weekly Sermon Podcast for iTunes
St. Aidan's Weekly Sermon Podcast for other software
