Podium

Podium is a software application that was developed specifically as an education tool, so that students can create, record, edit and publish podcasts, as well as save them to the hard drive.

The installation process is a piece of cake, while the interface you come by encloses quite a simple and clean layout. It encloses several buttons and a few panes which let you easily input various information. Although no Help contents are provided, all sort of tips appear on the screen each time a particular button or box is clicked, thus making sure that both power and novice users can learn how to handle it with ease.

First and foremost, you should know it is possible to input information about the podcast you are creating, including name, author and a short description, episode title and summary, as well as upload a picture from the hard drive with the help of a file browser. It supports formats such as BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, WMF, EMF and ICO.

In addition to that, it is possible to upload audio tracks (e.g. WAV, MP3) from the computer as part of your podcast, as well as record your voice with Podium, from the main window.

You can take advantage of volume control points, playback the resulted recording with a custom volume and crop items. A wave form can be viewed in the main screen, while it is possible to zoom in and out with just a click of the button.

This tool enables you to add an unlimited number of chapters with a user-input name, as well as scripts, so that actors can easily know what they need to say and when.

Last but not least, the recording can be saved to your PC as an MP3, while episodes and podcasts can be saved as PODIUM projects or MP3 files.

To conclude, Podium is an efficient piece of software which enables all user categories to create their own podcasts and save them with ease. It does not hamper the computer’s performance, jobs are completed in a timely fashion and we did not come across any errors or hangs in our tests.

However, you should know that this product has been discontinued and therefore, it is not going to receive any more updates and might not work properly with newer versions of Windows, such as 8 and 8.1.