A while back, I thought I would try my hand at creating a podcast for design engineers. It would contain a little bit of news, a little bit of new products and anything else I thought might be of interest. Since this was for internal purposes only, I grabbed the nearest thing in sight, which happened to be a tape recorder, as in standard cassette tape. After the demo was finished, the tape was easy enough to pass around the office—most people still can play cassette tapes, either in the car or at home. And if not, I was able to loan them the tape recorder.

            But then our eMedia Product Manager, Jason Brown, who resides in Colorado, asked if I could e-mail him the demo podcast. When I told him it was on cassette tape, he mumbled something about whether or not I was still listening to vinyl records. Since the podcast was not high on our list of priorities, Jason never got a chance to hear it.

            Then, last week, Jason e-mailed me to say he had just purchased an iPod nano and asked if there was any way I could e-mail him the podcast. I said sure, knowing that I could do an a/d conversion one way or another. My first thought was to simply connect the earphone jack on the tape recorder to the audio in jack on my notebook PC—fat chance finding a cable in my house for that purpose. But my house is full of surprises, being an editor and all, and having a steady stream of gadgets sent to my attention from enterprising young public relations people. I'm not sure exactly why they send this stuff to me, since we don't write about much other than new EOEM products in EE Product News. I guess they don't read the magazine.

            In any case, I looked around my house and was able to locate a product called Instant Music from a company called ADS Tech (www.adstech.com). This product is advertised as a way to record your old LPs and cassettes to audio CDs and MP3 files. Exactly what I need, I thought, and the best part is that the cables come with the gadget. Well, not exactly. The cable that comes with the Instant Music device has male RCA jacks (white and red) on both ends. No portable tape recorder that I've ever seen has RCA jacks. But, as I mentioned earlier, lots of people still have tape decks at home—at least I do—and these have the requisite RCA jacks.

            I popped the tape into the tape deck, connected it to the Instant Music gizmo, which by the way is about the size of a portable cassette recorder, and then connected it to my notebook PC through the USB port. The gizmo gets its power from the USB port, so there's no power supply to fret about. I fired up the software, and after a few false starts, was able to do the a/d conversion of the podcast. The beauty of the software, called the Nero Audio Suite, is that it allows you to listen to the audio as you are capturing it, and then lets you play with the audio after you've got the file on your PC. I didn't bother with this feature for the podcast demo, but the software is supposed to give you the ability to eliminate pops and clicks from songs—when you're using Instant Music for the purpose it was designed for.

            The resulting podcast file, which was 25 minutes or so, took up 212 MB on the hard disk as a wave (.wav) file. The software, though, let me condense that to an 18 MB MP3 file, which I uploaded to an ftp site so that Jason could access it. I've yet to hear from Jason on it, but I'm sure he won't have any problems loading it onto his iPod nano. Next on my list is to capture some of the songs from my vinyl records.