which podcasts have I listened to?
I’ve been downloading podcasts for a while, now. I’ve been using iPodder and Doppler to grab a wide range of feeds, and they quickly start filling up disk space. As I work through listening to this heap of podcasts, one problem becomes more and more significant. How do I track what I have listened to? (and how do I avoid listening to things more than once?)
Both these tools create a file structure with one folder per feed, and just dump whatever ‘casts they grab into the appropriate folder. When I decide to update the files I carry around, I look through the player and delete any that I have heard, then select some from the files on the PC to add to the player.
This seems OK, until you consider the problem of tracking which particular episodes of which feeds have been listened to, and which haven’t. Every podcaster uses a different approach to naming, so the names are no particular help. Datestamps on the files are those of the download, rather than the creation, of the ‘cast which may not be very useful for ordering. Doppler, for example, has the strange behaviour of downloading episodes from a new feed in reverse order!.
For a while I tried setting up a parallel folder structure - one half for incoming new ‘casts, and one half for the ones that have been listened to. Moving things across is manual and fiddly, though.
As time goes on, I lean more in favour of tracking this kind of information with media metadata. Imagine a processing step in the podcatcher software that sets some kind of MP3 metadata “listened” field to “never” on download. Players and/or transfer tools can then set this item to a timestamp when the file is actually listened to. It should be relatively simple to build a “podcast browser” which (by default) only shows unlistened ‘casts. A player option to delete listened ‘casts as soon as they are played would seem a useful complement to this approach.
Is this a sensible idea? have I missed something obvious? All suggestions (and implementations) welcome.
