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Some tips for downloading content if you got a new iPod for Christmas.

Now comes the question of distribution. Where can I get podcasts? One would initially go to a website that categorizes podcasts based on their content. The websites list a brief synopsis about the podcast, a link to its main website and link to its feed. The two ways of obtaining the actual audio file are manual and automatic. The manual way consists of going to the podcasts website and downloading the episodes you want to listen to. Not every website hosts the actual audio files on their servers. This is because having many people download audio from your website takes up bandwidth, which costs money. Some websites may just offer links to their bittorrent files (the concept of bittorrent will not be explained here). Automatic distribution pertains to “feeds”. Feeds (usually RSS) are links to a website that monitor it for updated content. Once new material is uploaded the feed can see it. A podcast client is used to check those feeds periodically for new material. The client can be scheduled automatically every X amount of days. The feed can download either the actual audio file or a bittorrent file. The more robust clients have bittorent support built in.

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