Rockin’ Libsyn Podcasts: The Official Notre Dame Athletics Podcast

The Official Notre Dame Athletics Podcast hosts their podcast with libsyn

This series is all about showcasing Libsyn podcasters. Its sole purpose is to introduce these awesome podcasts to the world as well as share their podcasting insight to empower the community!


Q & A with Tim O’Connor from Fighting Irish Digital Media


When did you start podcasting?

NOTE: If I say “we” I mean “Notre Dame Athletics.” If I say “I” I am talking specifically about myself.

We’ve maintained an Official Notre Dame podcast for years. It was previously managed by our website hosting service and we used it to send out a subscription feed for audio content.

Coach press conferences, especially the head football coach’s conferences, were especially popular in this format.

Why did you start podcasting?

To make a long story short, our hosting service decided to eliminate support for podcasting before the start of the 2012 season and we made the decision to stick with the concept but manage it on our own.

This meant doing some research on hosting providers and the process of podcasting so that we could handle it in-house.

What’s your show about?

The Jack Swarbrick Show hosts their podcast on libsynCurrently we have three separate podcasts. I like to look at them as “two shows and one feed.”

In a nutshell: our strategy is to establish show feeds for all of our episodic content but also offer an overall podcast that allows users to subscribe to all of our audio content.

We currently have podcast feeds set up for the Mike Brey Radio Show, Jack Swarbrick Show, and the Official Notre Dame Podcast.

The Brey show is a weekly in-season radio and web video streamed show where Head Basketball Coach Mike Brey sits down with host Jack Nolan to talk Notre Dame Men’s Basketball.

The Jack Swarbrick Show is a weekly program featuring our Director of Athletics Jack Swarbrick and host Dave Juday. Jack and Dave talk about Notre Dame Athletics with a special focus on the high-level organizational news that is Jack’s primary focus as Director of Athletics.

Each episode also includes an interview segment with one of Notre Dame’s 26 head coaches and a special interview with a Student Athlete.

The Official Notre Dame Athletics Podcast includes both of the shows I mentioned above, as well as any audio content that we produce as part of covering the athletics department (press conferences).

Perhaps notable in its absence is a Football Coaches show podcast. We’ll start that when the season gets back up and running in the fall.

The Mike Brey Radio Show hosts their podcast files on LibsynWhat’s your podcasting set-up? Hardware, software, CMS, etc.

I get files directly from the show producers usually as a .wav.

Then I use Rogue Amoeba’s application Fission to open the file and export it as a podcast-sized file for upload.

I use a MacBook Pro to handle that.

As far as CMS is concerned, we use CBS Sports Network’s Netitor system, but for the most part we just present Libsyn’s default page as an iFrame in our official website.

This isn’t an ideal set up for presenting the new episodes, but it’s the best I can do at the moment given limited developer resources. I would love to take Libsyns’ solid XML resources and push our content into our website as styled HTML eventually.

How have you promoted your podcast?

When a new podcast is posted, we push it out through our official Twitter and Facebook accounts: @FightingIrish and Facebook.Com/FightingIrish.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started?

This is probably overly technical, but I’m something of a perfectionist: I wish I had known that the “Category” setting when publishing a new podcast shows up in the website as a sidebar header grouping.

If I had known this, I wouldn’t have set categories at all on the two shows (since they’re all the same category) and I would have been more disciplined about creating and applying categories on the feed podcast where they would have helped users to sort out or content.


We know you love the Fighting Irish! So what are you waiting for? You can subscribe to the Official Fighting Irish Athletics feed, The Jack Swarbrick Show or The Mike Brey Radio Show. If have some feedback for Notre Dame Athletics you can email Fidm(at)nd(dot)edu

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