smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I’ve come to a conclusion..

There is a huge potential for a developer, or a group of developers to step up to the plate and hook into the rapidly growing podcasting community.

Options right now are limited - sure, if you have a few hundred dollars spare, there is a huge range of audio editing software available, or can spend half a grand or more on a professional mixing desk then your all but set. What about folk who want to get into podcasting, but don’t want to commit at that kind of level, or simply don’t have the finances to become a mini radio station?

CastBlaster seems to be the ‘buzzword’ right now, of course the beta window opened and then closed so fast it makes light travel look like catching the last bus out of ‘dodge, but at least it ’sounds’ promising - that’s if hearing about it nearly every single podcast Adam Curry churns out extolling the virtues of a product that few have had a chance to actually see (let alone use) hasn’t ground one down by now..

I’ve tried Audacity - a great audio recording application, unless one is working with large audio files at which point it eats everything in it’s path. Development on it seems at best slow..

MixCast Live is an interesting and inexpensive option - it’s a little rough around the edges but shows great potential, again it seems development has all but stalled at this stage.

There are a plethora of simple (or not so simple) audio recorders available, however as is always the case, unless you have amassed vast wealth, the good options are all but out of reach.

There is demand, a massive amount of demand for something that is lightweight, simple to use, with a good feature base and can mix in skype, music, voice and anything else that’s got an audio output.

I believe the person, developer or software house, who blends a mixer, recorder, id tag editor, RSS editor, ’show notes’ generator (and perhaps an ftp facility) will have a product people will line up for in huge numbers. Make it open source, or damned cheap and you have just cornered a market that is growing almost exponentially. Add web hosting and you’ve just set yourself up for life!

Am I the only person who can see this?!