World of Warcast - A World of Warcraft Podcast

Welcome! Alliance or Horde, Paladin or Mage, veteran or newbie, everyone is welcome here.

This is "World of Warcast", a weekly podcast based on the popular Blizzard game "World of Warcraft".

Our goal is to bring you a new "Warcast" every Monday morning. We'll record the Warcast over the weekend and if everything goes well, have it out before your Monday morning commute.

Who we are

Starman and Lindyen are veterans of online gaming. From the early days of Doom and Marathon, to Bolo, Age of Empires, Everquest, Xbox Live, and now World of Warcraft, we've run the gamut on internet gaming.

Starman used to run his own radio show back at Trenton State on WTSR 91.3 FM. Considering that I'm using the name "Trenton State", you know it was a LONG time ago.

How this is put together

Computer: PowerMac G5
Software: Garage Band
Mixer: PowerWave

That's all for now. I'll be getting the forums up and running, as well as tweaking the main page over the next few days. Look for our first Warcast on July 4, 2005 (but we may have a pilot show before then).

Starman

About a year or so ago I bought a Griffin Powerwave to convert old vinyl albums and audio cassettes to .WAV format. I haven't used the thing in months and was going to use it for the podcast. Turns out the unit's acting up. You have to press down on the top of the case for the device to show up under Mac OS X (and would probably behave the same under Windows). This is going to put a damper on things for the first podcast. I'm sure I'll get it working one way or the other. Where did I put that soldering iron?

The forums seem to be in order. I installed Horde and Alliance themes thanks to boo on the phpBB boards.

EDIT: I dropped the thing from an inch or so above the table and now it works! :D

As of this afternoon, we're officially listed on the iTunes Podcast Directory. Whoo!

I threw the web site together very fast, I'll be updating it in the next day or so with the right links for the podcast feeds, a more readable site, and other things. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here's our new logo.

When the site first came online, I had direct links to the AAC and MP3 files. I created MP3 files for those of you that were unable to play AAC files on your computer or device. Since the podcast got picked up by iTunes, I dropped the direct links, but kept the RSS feed links for those of you that use podcast subscription applications like iPodderX (Mac) or FeedDemon (Windows).

Looking at the stats of the downloads this morning, ZERO people downloaded Episode 2 in MP3 format, it's all been AAC. Only 19 people downloaded Episode 1 in MP3 format which makes me wonder if anyone's using MP3 at all to listen to the podcast.

I know that there are AAC plugins for Winamp, but I don't know if there are any for MusicMatch or Windows Media Player. I tried WMP 9 and it choked on grabbing the right codec.

So I have two points here:

1) Does anyone care about direct links?
2) Should we even bother making MP3 versions anymore?

Let us know in the forums.

I had set this up a while back, but never got around to announcing it.

If anyone wants to leave questions or comments, use Skype and send voicemail to:

worldofwarcast

This isn't for chatting with us directly since we won't be approving anyone for chat.

Apple listed us on their World of Warcraft page

http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2004/11/worldofwarcraft/

I realize that there are listeners out there that don't use iTunes or iPods to listen to the show. The problem is that it takes time to put together two formats, and the number of MP3 downloads was so insignificant that it didn't warrant the extra time to support it anymore. Therefore, I'm officially cancelling MP3 support and moving ahead with AAC.

AAC is an open format from Apple which offers much more than MP3 files. It supports chapter stops, web links, chapter artwork, better compression, and exports directly from GarageBand which is what I use to edit the show.

You can still convert the show to MP3 using iTunes. Select "MP3" as your import type and when you get a new episode, right click on it and convert it to MP3.

Admittedly, I haven't had much time to listen to many WoW podcasts. Every day I'm listening to something, be it TWiT, Diggnation, TC, Gamecast Online...there's just not enough time in the week (and in the car) to listen to everything. I finally got around to listening to WoWcast (note the similar name :) ) and Alachia has put together a very good show. We welcome her to the WoW podcast family. You can find the link to her show on the left. Maybe she'll come by for a visit someday.

World of Warcast is proud to announce the opening of its store. You can find T-shirts, mugs, mousepads, and other goodies.

Click here for the World of Warcast Store