Rødecaster Pro podcasting mixer reviewed

• EFTM has published (the first?) video review of the Røde Rødecaster Pro. It looks a beautiful and highly-powered device. The reviewer, Trevor Long - who also podcasts - says “I’m ecstatic about it.”

• Megaphone's website has a new look, and a new logo. The podcast host, based in Washington DC and Brooklyn NY, USA, powers 1,200 shows.

• Podtrac has posted their top (US) podcast publishers for November 2018. New in this chart is a verified tick showing subscribers to Podtrac’s verified measurement service. Podtrac appear to have overwritten October 2018's figures with November’s, so we can’t compare them month-on-month.

  
  Aug 8 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Castbox has published its 2018 Year In Review of the most popular shows listened on Castbox. Among the popular shows (like Joe Rogan, Dr Death) there’s also a look at popular shows around the world, like # NHKラジオニュース (that’s NHK Radio News, on-demand, from Japan).

  • En Français: «Les meilleurs podcasts pour avoir un avis sur le monde en 2019» (The Best Advice Podcasts for 2019, in French)

• Pacific Content has also posted a look back at 2018 from an industry point of view.

• Advice: Rob Greenlee from Spreaker and Voxnest shares 6 takeaways about podcasting to VMH Magazine, while Spreaker also shares 8 tips for growing your podcast listeners (not literally, we hope, since Rob listens occasionally and he’s pretty tall). Blubrry has some help for people who want to do “live podcasts”.

• Anna Faris, host of Unqualified, has designed her own podcast studio, reports the Hollywood Reporter, and plans six more celebrity-hosted shows.

• The CBC has put out an RFP for international sales representation for their podcasts.

• Anchor’s design team have posted their design principles for their apps, where they design a “look that makes podcasting fun rather than complicated”. The company also has a new support manager, Vincent Carbellano.

• If you say unpleasant things on unpleasant podcasts, you thankfully stand a risk of losing your job, as an unpleasant man from Virginia USA has discovered.

Podcasts

Calling itself “the first ever Audiostate ever released”, The Narrow Caves is the first podcast from US horror film magazine FANGORIA. Their CEO, Dallas Sonnier, describes it as “a new type of content that combines the immersive quality of Hollywood films with the intimacy of audio, creating an ‘ear-movie’ experience”.

ESPN radio broadcaster Dan Le Batard, who apparently has “strongly held, incisive and often contrarian opinions – as well as irreverent wit” launches a new weekly podcast in early January. LeBatard and Friends - South Beach Sessions has a preview episode up now.

Developer Corner

• Amazon Alexa has changed the audio clip limit in skills from 90 seconds to 240 seconds (that’s four minutes), and increased the allowable sample rate. If you’re publishing cross-platform, however, Google Assistant’s still stuck at 120 seconds.

• Want to mess about with NPR’s consumption analytics spec, RAD? We added a test audio file with lots of RAD tags in it the other day. Here is the 'tail’ of our RAD tracking server logs, so you can see what we get the other end. Depending on how quick you are, you’ll notice at least one enterprising tester is using it as a chat board.