Create enhanced podcasts with Podcast AV

I really enjoy enhanced podcasts. The embedded chapters, images and links make the whole thing that much more enjoyable and useful. When really done well (like these 2005 PGA Championship podcasts), they're great. The only problem has been that creating them is tricky at best. I found this great tutorial over at Make: Blog, but it does require that some work be done in the Terminal, and not everyone is comfortable with that. Wouldn't it be great to have a GUI-based application that did all the dirty work for you?

Old Jewel software is working on it, and they call it Podcast AV. It's currently in beta, but I've been playing around with it for a little while tonight and it's quite nice. Navigate to your audio file, create chapters, drag and drop your photos and hyperlinks and save. No Terminal, no cryptic commands, no techno voodoo. Podcast AV will run on any Macintosh running Mac OS X 10.4 and Quicktime 7. You can read the full "Read Me" file and a tutorial here.

The beta release is free, but expect to pay a shareware fee for the 1.0 release (no word on what the final cost will be). This is certainly one to keep an eye on.

[Via Download Squad]