We link to a variety of digital media from this website. This page contains some information to help you, should you run into difficulties with any of them.

Podcasts

To subscribe to a podcast, you need an application called a podcast aggregator or client. The most popular is iTunes but there are many to choose from. A good list is available here.

When you subscribe (note that most often subscription is free) to a podcast you are subscribing to the RSS (really simple syndication) feed, rather than an individual piece of audio, video, or any other file type. This means that every time a new episode is published, you receive it automatically (when your podcast aggregator application next updates). Blogs work in the same way. In fact, podcasts can be thought of as blogs with attached, or enclosed, media files. The most common enclosures are audio (.mp3), enhanced audio (.m4a), video (.mov) or text/image (.pdf) files.

You should be able to subscribe to a podcast by simply clicking on its feed link. If this doesn’t work, right/control click on the link, open your podcast aggregator application (iTunes or similar), go to the Subscribe to Podcast option (in the Advanced menu in iTunes) and paste in the link.

Feedburner

Our RSS feeds are redirected through a very useful service called Feedburner, which is used by many podcasters and bloggers. If you click on a Feedburner link you’ll be taken to a page on their site which offers you a variety of subscription options and direct links to play and download episodes.

MP3

Most of our audio programmes, including our audio only podcasts, are available as MP3 (.mp3) files. Almost every computer, operating system and portable device should be able to play MP3s. Popular players include iTunes (Mac and PC), Windows Media Player (PC and Mac), Real Player (multi platform including mobile), Winamp (PC), M-Player (Linux, PC and Mac), VLC (Linux, PC and Mac), Divx Player (multi platform, including mobile). More MP3 players can be found here.

AAC

AAC (.m4a) stands for Advanced Audio Codec. These files are a flavour of MP4. But we don’t really need to get into the nitty gritty of that here. We use them often to make enhanced podcasts. Enhanced podcasts are divided into chapters and can chapter titles, images and hyper links. They can be downloaded (individually or automatically as podcasts) and played in iTunes (and on iPods) or in any web browser if Quicktime is installed.

Streams

Streamed content served by Radio Magnetic’s streaming server is in Windows Media Audio or Video format. To play these streams you must be online (as streams are on demand rather than downloadable) and using one of these players:

• Windows: Windows Media Player
• Mac: Flip4Mac Windows Media Player plugin for Quicktime
• Linux: M-Player
• Symbian: we’re still looking. If you find one you’d like to share, please comment on this page

Videos

We use these three video formats:

• YouTube (Flash Video .flv format)
• Quicktime (.mov)
• Windows Media Video (.wmv)

The above-mentioned players will handle these formats.

Mobile Versions

For some of the content we produce, we make mobile-friendly versions. Typically these are specially encoded MP3 files for audio and 3GP files for video. These should play on Symbian, Windows Mobile, Sony Erricson and other popular mobile operating systems.

If you have a problem playing digital media files that isn’t answered by anything on this page, or you would like to report a site fault (very much appreciated) then please feel free to contact us.