Sarah Chronicles

Making Audio a Podcast on my Zune

First of all, I have to say I’m back! Hopefully my future posts will be a lot more technical than this one.

This has been a personal bug bear of mine for a while. I use my Zune in certain ways and it’s not really catered for my needs very well; until now that is!

The functions I most use on the Zune are playlists, shuffle (for songs) and podcasts. They all work really well, but I’m always stuck with a dilemma. Often I download classes and other audio material from the Internet that do not come in the form of podcasts. Usually when I copy those to the Zune they end up in the music section, and then as I operate the song shuffle mode a “tune” will start playing that is actually some news report or class!

I wanted a way to access those on demand without having them mixed up in my music library. My favourite time is work around time :)

Obviously I could take the files on host them on an Intranet site and create podcasts for each category of file, but that seemed like too much work for such a simple thing. This method is much simpler, but not as pretty.

Fortunately the solution was pretty simple in this instance. I learned from hunting around on the web that all that is necessary is to change a simple property on each file and set the “genre” to podcast.

After a bit of tinkering it all worked out well, but there are some gotchas to be aware of.

1. Modify the file properties before you copy them into a storage location the Zune software scans. Once you’ve copied the files there the Zune software seems to randomly reset the properties on files leading to some pretty unexpected results at times.
2. The podcast name is the name of the Album property of the file. If you have multiple files that need to fit into the same podcast section then set the album name the same for all of them.

It works brilliantly. I still need to figure out how to get the sort order of the files correct under each podcast, and also how to apply a logo to the podcast.