First off, welcome back to the Podfitness Blog! Right now, we’re retooling our blog to be more relevant to what you, as a Podfitness member, care about, and we’d like to welcome our newest blogger, Heather.

One of the new features of our blog is the “Definitive Guide” series, a (mostly ironically-named) series of guides for Podfitness newbies and veterans. Today’s guide is here to answer the question:

If music is so important to Podfitness, why doesn’t Podfitness come with music?

A big chunk of the DNA of Podfitness is music. By now, we’d guess most people know how beneficial music is to their workouts, and several studies have been done proving this point.

Podfitness was built largely on the idea that people would rather hear their own music during a workout than someone else’s idea of good music. Our team spent a great deal of time and effort building the technology to make this possible, and now we have a really cool mixer that lays personal training over music from your own computer, makes sure you can hear both at all times, and gives you a complete workout, ready to take to the gym (or wherever).

But there are 2 reasons this can trip up some people:

1. Not all music could be mixed with Podfitness workouts. Music that is locked down with DRM, such as many iTunes Music Store purchases, are unable to be unlocked for use with Podfitness (or anything else, for that matter).

2. Not everyone has a pre-defined list of music to use with their workouts, and some people would rather work out with “fitness music” that an instructor picks to match the workout.

How do we plan to fix this?

1. There’s a short-term workaround with DRM-protected music: You can burn your purchased music to CD and re-import the disc to remove the DRM. It’s kind of a pain, but we have confirmed that this does work.

Long-term, the issue of incompatible music is pretty much fixing itself: DRM is dying fast. All the music you buy from Amazon MP3, and much of the music in iTunes is now DRM-free, and can be freely used with Podfitness.

2. We want to make the transition easy for people that don’t already have music to mix with their Podfitness workouts.

Starting this week, we’ll be publishing “workout playlists” created by the staff at Podfitness, our trainers, and by our Community members (that’d be you). You can buy the songs at Amazon, and they’ll be dropped into iTunes, where you can use them for your next workout.

Also, we’d like to recommend the fantastic workout music at Power Music. It’s a bit spendy, but they’re known for making the best workout music out there.

Longer term, we have lots of ideas for a way to tie Podfitness with music more tightly, and we’d love to hear your opinions. We have 2 questions for you:

What music motivates you during your workouts?

How can Podfitness better integrate music?

Sound off in the comments, or as always, drop us a line at: info [a t] podfitness [d o t] com!