The great thing about podcasts is that you can listen or watch whenever you want and you can choose your entertainment. Podcasts are time-shifted, which basically means “on demand”. But the thing that separates podcasts from other internet media is the ability for subscriptions, where your favorite shows are downloaded straight to your computer or portable device for whenever you get the urge to listen.

However, subscriptions are not the only way to listen. At Rfl, I have a handy player located to the right at the top of the sidebar so you can stream the shows directly from the site. If you don’t feel like listening from the site, you can click on the “Download” link to download the show to your computer to play through programs such as Windows media Player, Winamp, Realplayer, and so on, or you can burn the shows to CD. You can even load them on your mp3 player.

Now, on to the cool way to enjoy podcasts, the subscriptions. Subscribing to a podcast is much like subscribing to anything else, except you do not have to pay for podcasts. Once subscribed, every time a new episode is released, it is automatically downloaded by a program called a podcatcher. Luckily, these programs are free to download from the net. If you want to listen on the computer, burn a cd, or own an mp3 player other than an iPod, here is a list of podcatchers for you to use.

And there are even web based podcatchers as well, here are a few.

All of these work in basically the same ways, but check them all out to find the one with the features you like the best. Once you have your podcatcher of choice, then you can subscribe to the show. You will notice the subscribe buttons in the sidebar. These are links to RfL’s feed. Either drag these into your podcatcher of choice, or enter the following url.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReachingForLucidity

Once this is done, you can then choose how you want the podcatcher to handle your podcast files. The podcasts can be downloaded to your hardrive where you can listen on the computer, burn the cd, or manually load it to your mp3 player, however, you can choose to sync your mp3 player to the podcatcher and the shows will be automatically downloaded to your mp3 player, ready to go. Be sure to look at the various podcatchers to see if it is compatable for direct downloading to your specific device. There you have it, all the podcatchers have directions on how to set everything up, so have a blast!

But, there is still one thing left to mention, the iPod. Contrary to popular urban legend, you do not need an iPod to listen to podcasts. As I have mentioned before, you can listen on any mp3 player, burn to disk, or listen from your computer, hell TIVO even let’s you listen through the TV. Even some cell phone companies are getting into mobile podcasting on their phones. So you do not “NEED” an iPod. But if you do have one, then you need iTunes. This is the music store from Apple which is also a podcatcher that syncs to the iPod. The music store also carries podcasts, as a matter of fact, it has one hell of a podcast directory.

To use iTunes, either look up Reaching for Lucidity in the directory and subscribe, or just put the above feed url into iTunes and you are ready to go.

Now that you know the various ways to listen to the show, get downloading people!