Podcastplayer.org news

Alison Fish writes about experiences of listening to podcasts using iTunes without an iPod. A Fish: Podcasting without an iPod: Tiffany Shlain, iTunes

I hope (if she continues) that she will have more luck listening to podcasts with iTunes than I did. I’ve uninstalled it now. I’m still looking for a good podcast listening solution.

One important thing about podcasts that I found out soon after starting is that it’s irritating to find you are listening to one you have already heard. iTunes has a flag that indicates whether (and when) a track was listened to (good), but I could not find any way to manually set this flag (bad). I have a fairly extensive collection of podcasts, some of which I have already listened to. I loaded my collection into iTunes and it effectively wanted me to listen to them all again in order to set the flag. This seems crazy.

I also object to the way that iTunes installed monitoring software that runs all the time, eating CPU cycles and memory, even without an iPod, and the way it greedily claimed lots of filetypes for itself, despite the presence of at least half a dozen other media players on my system.

The final nail in the coffin was that it seemed to provide absolutely no support for any other form of MP3 player other than an iPod, so I was still left dragging and dropping podcast files from the iTunes repository to my generic portable MP3 player, and (guess what) still not getting that crucial “it’s been listened to” flag set.

Sigh.