The fine community at Macintouch points to the Mac-specific area on Old Version Downloads – OldApps.com. Find old versions of lots of software, for Mac and PC: older email programs, audio editors, picture editors, FTP programs, and more. They even have older versions of Apple’s QuickTime. Looks like a great resource, especially if you’re spiffing up an older machine to save money.

And teachers always want to save money.

John Gruber pointed to this comprehensive guide to podcasting equipment. Dan Benjamin, a veteran podcaster, offers recommendations at four levels:

1. Beginner
2. Entry level
3. Mid-Range
4. Prosumer

Go read, and get to podcasting. (I’ll join you as soon as I’m done editing this video…)

The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is being directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet.

Every mp3 you discover on The Free Music Archive is pre-cleared for certain types of uses that would otherwise be prohibited by outdated copyright law. Are you a podcaster looking for pod-safe audio? A radio or video producer searching for instrumental bed music that won’t put your audience to sleep? A remix artist looking for pre-cleared samples? Or are you simply looking for some new sounds to add to your next playlist? The Free Music Archive is a resource for all that and more, and unlike other websites, all of the audio has been hand-picked by established audio curators.

There are alternatives to some of the paid apps they link to in this nice list of quick tips. Regrettably I don’t have time at the moment to link to them.Those aside, this is a good list for the Mac newbie, from TechRadar UK: 69 really useful OS X timesavers | News | TechRadar UK.

Thanks to Macintouch for pointing this morning to the update of Audacity, the terrific free audio editor and recorder. Podcasters, video producers, journalists, and independent musicians all over the world use it every day. It’s a great tool that keeps getting better. Put on your school’s computers for your students to play with. It’s free, useful, and fun.

This introduction is “gentle” only in technical terms; Mark Pilgrim’s language can get quite salty, so if your school’s filters block four-letter words, you’ll need to read this at home. Nonetheless, the four part A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding (part one, part two, part three, part four) is an excellent introduction to concepts, terminology, patent status, and limitations of the formats. It does not provide any instruction or tutorials, but those are widely available through the Google.

On his O’Reilly Digital Media Blog, David Battino offers a story about a video for his kids that’s a whirlwind tour of several editing tips and tricks in QuickTime Pro.

My housebound sons and a 12-year-old friend borrowed my digicam, set it to video mode, and improvised a spy movie. Not realizing they’d shot upwards of 25 clips, I offered to stitch the scenes together in QuickTime Pro (QTP), which I thought would be simpler and faster than iMovie.

Note that these are video clips from a digital still camera – not DV clips from a camcorder. iMovie won’t edit anything but DV or HD, and Windows Movie Maker won’t play with many flavors of video from digicams either. QuickTime, especially with options like Flip4Mac and Perian, let you edit almost any type of (non-Flash) video. What David demonstrates here with his soundtrack tricks shows how QT Pro may be the most underappreciated video and audio editor out there. Unfortunately, that’s due to its underdocumentation – and I appreciate David’s efforts here to document what he discovered while working on this.

At O’Reilly’s Digital Media blog, Todd Ogasawara offers A Newbie Looks at Podcasting Tools: Garageband, Audacity, and Levelator. It’s a good overview of mostly Mac-based tools, and includeds a link to and description of the (apparently invaluable) Levelator. I haven’t tested it yet, but many many podcasters are singing – or blogging – its praises.

Todd publishes periodic posts on the O’Reilly blog about FFOSS – Freeware/Free and Open Source Software. Put that link in your RSS reader – worth it!