A couple of months ago Visit Manchester, the city’s official tourism website, launched HearManchester.com, a 10-part audio guide to the Rochdale Canal and Petersfield.

Presented by John Robb, the downloadable and streamable guides are entitled inspired, green, en-route, underground, unsung (which I found most interesting), radical, poetic, human, proud and industrial. Each part includes interviews with local experts – ‘ranging from city councillors to body-poppers, psychogeographers to popstars’ – and has a PDF transcript and an associated map, highlighting some of the main points of interest.

The individual guides have a physical trailmarker (such as the one pictured and this one) to encourage people to website, and the project is being promoted as part of next week’s Manchester Science Festival. The guide, produced by Northern Quarter digital agency StarDotStar, has also been shortlisted for a BIMA Award.

Delivered by VisitManchester, Manchester Music Speaks is a series of six podcasts about the local music scene.

Each 10-minutes clip looks at ‘Manchester music icons and the city that shaped the sounds’ from a different point of view, with Mike Joyce, John Robb, Peter Hook, Liam Frost and Guy Garvey giving the guided tours.

I’ve just listened to John Robb’s, which was pretty interest. He believes that Manchester is ‘a people city’ where people shouldn’t come if they want to look at buildings. He visits Oxford Road and Chorlton and mentions some old music venues I’d never even heard of.

The Smiths’ Mike Joyce talks to Oly Bayston from Keith in Dry Bar and visits the Salford Lads’ Club, which has a room full of photos of tourists striking their best The Queen is Dead poses.

Three of the Manchester Music Speaks podcasts are available now (for the price of your email address), with the remaining three released month-by-month.

Here’s an mp3 of BBC Radio 2′s Mark Radcliffe giving an audio guide to Manchester for the excellent Guardian Travel website.

He’s very enthusiastic about his ‘home town’ (he’s technically from Bolton), talking in particular about Albert Square, GMex, the Midland and Radisson hotels, Mr Sam’s Chop House, Royal Exchange and the Gay Village.

‘It’s a city you have to work to know,’ he says while sat in Briton’s Protection. Briton’s used to be next to an armed forces recruiting office apparently, which goes some way to explaining the name.

He also discusses the Northern Quarter and Affleck’s Palace in some detail, and Oxford Road (‘very close to my heart’).

The podcast finishes, like many good Mancunian nights, in the Curry Mile. Mark talks about being an undergraduate in 1976 when there were only a few ‘unlicensed curry canteens’ in Rusholme. How times have changed.

Advertised as ‘Europe’s first live music video podcast’, Real Fresh TV is a collective of arty types who, to begin with, are making three-minute shorts of Manchester gigs. They’re on Flickr and Myspace, and you can find their videos on YouTube. Here’s one of their latest, featuring Rachael Kitchenside, John Smith, Palo Alto and Otra Mano at In The City 2006: