How to Listen

The Sound of Young America
  • Archive
  • Podcast Feed
  • Subscribe in iTunes


    • Untitled Thorn/Morris Project
  • Podcast Feed
  • Subscribe in iTunes


    • The Kasper Hauser Comedy Podcast
  • Archive
  • Podcast Feed
  • Subscribe in iTunes


    • The College Years
  • Podcast Feed
  • Subscribe in iTunes



    		•  The Overview

    The Sound of Young America is available three ways: as a podcast, as a free stream or download from our archive, or on the radio. We also produce three podcast-only programs: "The Untitled Thorn/Morris Project," "The College Years," and "The Kasper Hauser Comedy Podcast."

    If you're already a podcast user, you'll find links to the feed and to iTunes for each of our programs on the left. If you're not yet a podcast user, an easy how-to follows.

    Podcast How-To

    Most of our internet listeners chose to listen via podcast. The podcast doesn't require an iPod -- it's really just a free "subscription" to the show. Each week, we put up an MP3 file of our latest show. "Podcatching" software on your computer then downloads it automatically. Once it's downloaded, it's like any other digital audio file. You can listen on your computer, listen on your iPod or other MP3 player, or even burn it to a CD.

    Using iTunes

    The most popular "podcatching" software is Apple's iTunes. iTunes is designed not only to help you download podcasts, but also to organize your whole digital media collection. (And, of course, to sell you more digital media through the iTunes store.) It includes a useful directory of podcasts, and is particularly useful if you have an iPod, since it can be set to transfer newly downloaded podcasts to your player automatically. iTunes can be downloaded free here.

    Once you've downloaded and installed it, either search for "The Sound of Young America" and click on subscribe, or use this link to find the show in their directory.

    An Alternative: Juice

    If you'd prefer not to use Apple's commercial software, or just don't care for iTunes, there's another great solution. We've created a version of the free, open-source podcatcher "Juice" which comes pre-subscribed to The Sound of Young America. Juice is smaller than iTunes, and is designed specifically (and exclusively) for podcatching. If you don't need the bells and whistles, you can just download Juice, install it, and you'll be taken care of.


    Download Juice (Right Click and "Save Target As")

    A Fuller Explanation (AKA All About Feeds)

    With the information above, you should be able to get started downloading and listening to podcasts like The Sound of Young America. But I know you... you're curious about exactly what all this podcasting stuff is about. Here's a fuller version of the story.

    Central to how a podcast works is something called a "feed." The feed is basically a file which lists items available on a blog, website, or podcast. Every time we publish a new show, the list of available shows in our podcast feed is updated. Every time we publish a new blog item, the list of entries in our blog's feed is updated.

    They don't seem like much, but feeds are a revolutionary idea. Let's take the blog example.

    Many folks read blogs just as they do any other website. They visit the blog's site regularly, and see if there's anything new. If there is, they decide if they want to read it. That system works fine, but feeds revolutionize it.

    I read about forty blogs every day. If I visited forty blog websites every day, I wouldn't have time to eat. Especially considering how much of my time would be spent visiting websites that hadn't even been updated since I visited yesterday. This is where the feeds come in.

    Instead of visiting forty blog websites every day, I visit one. This site's called Bloglines, and it's what's called an aggregator. I tell bloglines where to find the feeds for my forty blogs. Then, when I visit Bloglines, that site simply checks those forty feeds and tells me what's new. Many feeds even contain all the content of the updates -- so I don't have to visit the blog's website, instead, it's delivered to me on a platter. I get all the content I want, and I get right when it's published.

    Subscribing to a feed is a lot like subscribing to a magazine. Sure, I could go pick up The New Yorker every week from the newsstand, but instead, I subscribe. Every time there's a new issue, it's delivered to my mailbox. I take it out and read it, or if I'm busy, I throw it away. Replace "issue" with "blog post" or "podcast" and "mailbox" with "aggregator" or "podcastcher," and that's a reasonable description of how feeds work.

    This works for stuff other than blogs, too. I subscribe to a feed of the Arts section of the New York Times, for example. I even subscribe to one which sends me any new postings in the Jobs section of Craigslist that have the word "radio" in them. All these feeds and more are centralized on my aggregator, and that aggregator updates whenever I ask it to.

    The great idea of the guys who invented podcasting was to take these feeds, and add links to media files -- first MP3s, later video and even .PDFs. With these files attached, you could suddenly subscribe not only to text information, but to multimedia -- podcasts. When you start up your podcatcher (be it iTunes, Juice, or something else), the software checks the feeds of the podcasts you're subscribed to. If there are new items (in this case shows), it downloads them automatically. Once they're downloaded, you can do whatever you want with them -- manage them with iTunes, put them on a CD, listen to them on your computer, whatever.



    "While the modern indoor game of bowling contrasts markedly with these early examples, the most prevalent form of cheating still current on the lanes is the laying back of skill."