Podcasts? Well, of course!

While I have my usual line-up of podcasts that I like (you can see some of them above), every so often I’ll want to search around through audio to find something that’s particularly on my topic of interest.

Suppose I’m curious about something that we’ve discussed in earlier SRS posts–say, “how tides work”–is there some way to find a podcast or two on that topic? That is, without manually scrubbing through lots of podcast descriptions, hoping to find one that mentions ocean tides in the podcast description.

The other time I need to search through audio is when I have a recording of some event, and I’d like to be able to search the TEXT of that recording.

These audio search questions leads to this week’s Challenges:

1. Is there some way I can search through all of the podcasts on the internet for ones that mention a particular topic? Let’s try finding a few podcasts that discuss the way oceanic tides work. Can you find a podcast or two?

2. If I have a recording of a conversation, what’s the best way to be able to search the contents of that recording for mentions of a particular key word or phrase? How would you recommend I do this? (Bonus points if you can figure out how to do this for more than just English.)

3. How can I find a particular non-spoken sound–say, the bells of Notre Dame or the sound of a glass harmonica?

As always, let us know HOW you found these. We’d all like to be better searchers… of audio! So tell us what you did!

A big tip of the hat to my friend in online searching skills, Henk van Ess, for the audio search idea in the first place.

Search on!