I’ve been experimenting with Garage Band in the new iLife ’06. It makes it a lot easier to create podcasts with chapters and embedded images. It does, however, take quite a bit of getting used to. It is not really particularly good at editing recordings – particularly when compared to Audacity – but is pretty good at one-take recordings. As long as I don’t make any errors that I need to go back to fix, it’s fine. If I need to cut and splice, it becomes quite a hassle. Perhasp as I get more used to it, it will get easier. But for now, I imagine I’ll keep using Audacity for longer recordings.

I also discovered that if you export a podcast at the “Podcast” quality setting, it sounds like an AM radio announcer not quite tuned in all the way. I had to go all the way to “Better” quality to get the quality that I’ve been publishing at up until now. So I guess they have a different idea than I do about what constitutes sufficient quality. I don’t mind downloading a slightly larger file, particularly given that this is usually done out-of-band while I’m doing something else, if the quality is going to be that much better.