Podcasting.

I'm not saying I'll ever podcast, but I'm trying to figure out how I would do it with my iBook. I've got a decent microphone, which came with ViaVoice. (ViaVoice -- a dictation to typing program -- made me imagine it would make work wondrously easier. It did not. It just introduced a weird new world of tasks, along with a certain amount of found humor, similar to spellcheck humor, as it heard what you said and guessed what word you meant. It didn't know any of the proper nouns in the cases I was writing about, so the writing was full of ridiculous substitutions. You spend a lot of time correcting errors and trying to get it to understand you. Trying to get an inanimate thing to understand you is a chump's game. It's not going to fall in love with you. My ViaVoice relationship was doomed to remain forever at the dictation-to-typing level.)

I've read you can do the basic recording for podcasting in Garage Band, which is a fancy program designed to do so much more than voice recording. It becomes an effort to get the fancy stuff out of your way just to record. I couldn't figure out how to pause. And then I got distracted by the fancy stuff that was easy to figure out and recorded multiple voice tracks in the manner of Glenn Gould's "Solitude Trilogy" (remember "The Idea of North" in "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould"?).

So I need to be able to pause. Voice activation would be better. And Garage Band doesn't take you from recording to a file you can put up on the blog. I like how easy it is to use iPhoto to get the photos up on the blog (though I must admit it took me a long time to figure out how to do it). Shouldn't podcasting be part of iLife? But iBlog wasn't even an Apple product.

Any advice? I mean simple, Macintosh advice.

UPDATE: A very nice emailer has helped me up to the point where I can record in Garage Band -- the space bar works to pause -- and make an MP3 file by importing it into iTunes and converting it. After that, I'm stymied. I was going to put it onto my Mac.com homepage, but the file is 2 MB and that will use up too much space too quickly. Then there's the whole RSS aspect to it all that I don't even want to think about yet. I hit the wall, tech-wise, for the day just getting this far.

MORE: It troubles me to see how much memory an audio file uses, even saved at a low quality level. A text file of the entire novel "Moby Dick" is less than my little 10 minute blabber. Isn't that just wrong?