As podcasting grows, individuals and companies will be looking for ways to take advantage. They'll need a way to create their podcasts -- audio shows of some sort -- and a way to publish them where others can download them.

There's already a good "everything-in-the-box" solution called Podcast Factory. Podcast Factory bundles together several near-broadcast quality components to make podcast creation and publishing easy.

At the core is a professional audio interface that plugs into your computer's USB port. It looks like a small radio station mixing board, but has only two inputs -- one for your microphone and one for a musical instrument. You can adjust the mix as well as the levels of your inputs and output to give you optimal sound.

Podcast Factory comes with a sturdy microphone that M-Audio calls broadcast quality. It does have quality that would suffice for many AM radio stations and many other applications. Certainly, it will sound great on your computer's speakers. Then, to make sure that you can record without having to hold your mike, it even comes with a portable, desktop mike stand.

The tie to podcasting is the included software -- an audio editing program called Audacity, and a program called Podifier that helps you post your finished podcast to the Web. Both are easy to install and learn, so you'll be up to speed quickly.

Although Podcast Factory is advertised as a complete professional podcasting package, it serves well beyond podcasting. You can use it to create sound tracks for your online movies, and to add sound to your PowerPoint presentations.

I found that by replacing the microphone with a high-end broadcast microphone, it was even difficult to tell the difference between recordings made in a broadcast radio station and with Podcast Factory. On the Net, prices range from $140 to $190; from M-Audio (an Avid company) www.m-audio.com.