The above is a cell phone call I made to the new podcasting system Evoca. Reviewed today by both TechCrunch and Mashable, I found this service via eHub. There's browser based recording, phone-in recording, descriptions, tags, RSS feeds, groups, albums and oh so much more. You can also charge a fee for listeners to be able to listen - but the first one here is on me, ok?
Update: I've tried two more times to make recording through Firefox on a Mac. Both times I got choppy recordings that were lost when I tried to save them. I saw an error screen about browser difficulties and am now frustrated enough that I will be darned if I try the browser record again.
The service is free for pretty basic use but for $5 per month you can do lots more, including recording Skype phone calls! Very nice for those of us on a Mac.
Problems:
- I hit error messages more than once.
- My browser recording got cut off on the beginning and end, though I've only tried it once so far.
- I'd sure like a direct link to the MP3 file up there in that iframe player. I presume, for example, that the file won't be delivered as an enclosure in this RSS feed as I have the file inserted now.
- There's a couple of pages that seem disconnected. At one point it
looked like I could only "add to a blog" in blogger.com, but at another point I got this nice little iframe
code you see displayed above. I imagine that means to publish automatically, which would be rad. I'd like
to do that on Word Press.
- The company blog takes pride in their international users, but it sure would be nice to have an 800 number for people in the developing world to call. Maybe this is totally unrealistic and Skype recording is the way to do it. The blog is stoked about a user from Ghana, but only certain kinds of folks in Ghana are going to want to drop $5 per month for premium membership. I guess that's just how things work and I should go take it up with the UN or something to plunk down the money for an 800 number podcast recording system.
1. hey there marshall. i am sure others will respond to you but i wanted to respond to you on behalf of mac users. i use evoca and have been part of the beta team. i run a powerbook G4 and have had the same problems you are describing. i think it has more to do with our onboard mic than anything. even when i use garageband or something i get the same result. a lot of cutting out. i have found that when i use my iSight mic i get a lot better recording. one of those things i guess. i hope a 1-800 number becomes available as i have a lot of friends internationally that will not be able to tap into evoca because of this. we will certainly work on something. at any rate. thank you for trying us out and finding us favorable overall. keep talking...we're listening!
drew.
Posted at 10:11PM on Mar 27th 2006 by drew