At the moment I’m trying a side-by-side comparison of what seem to be the two leading Windows examples of podcast fetcher (a.k.a “podfetcher” or “podcatcher") software iPodder and Doppler. I started with iPodder a while ago, when I first got “into” podcasting - after all, it’s the one that’s mentioned in lots of “how to get started” tutorials. Recently, I have been trying Doppler as an alternative, to see if it improves on any of the niggles I have with iPodder.
It’s not that I have any major complaints about iPodder. It certainly does the basic job of fetching RSS enclosures OK. The issues I have with it are mainly confined to the way it deals with feeds with more than one enclosure, and a whole bunch of things that I feel ought to be there in the user interface.
The main problem (to me) with the way iPodder fetches podcasts is the way it seems to assume that only RSS entries from “today” onward are worth downloading. Several times I have found a new feed, added it to iPodder, selected the new feed and clicked “check selected feed", only to find that it reports nothing downloaded. If I take a look at the feed, I can usually clearly see several entries with enclosures. iPodder, though, seems to consider these as “old news” and doesn’t bother to fetch them. This is especially problematic with feeds such as audio books. The RSS sensibly contains all the chapters so far, but iPodder will only start downloading from the next one.
Doppler improves on this a little. It still has the strange habit of only fetching the most recent entry (and no obvious way of overriding this behaviour), but I have found that if I repeatedly click “retrieve now” it works through the feed fetching the most recent unfetched enclosure until it has grabbed all the feed has to offer. Doppler does have the opposite of what I’m looking for, though. It has a “catch up” option which marks all entries in a feed as “downloaded".
Common sense would seem to say that subscribing to a new feed should at least offer the option of fetching the “back catalog", even if the fetcher prefers to be a good net citizen and space out the fetches rather than grabbing all the enclosures at once.
As for UI features, I keep expecting iPodder to (somehow) allow me to at the very least examine the properties of a subscribed feed (the feed URL, items fetched, items not fetched, etc.), and ideally edit them. As it stands, if I want to look up where a particular feed comes from (for example, to recommend it to a friend) I can’t ask iPodder, even though it knows the URL. I’d also like to be able to view downloaded podcasts for a feed by clicking on the feed title, so I can click on a downloaded podcast to listen to it, delete it, refetch it, or manually transfer it to a player. As it stands, I have to use the regular folder explorer to navigate to wherever I told iPodder to put the ‘casts. iPodder knows this information, but it keeps it to itself.
Doppler, again, is slightly better in this regard. It does offer the opportunity to view/edit feed properties, and double-clicking a feed allows viewing of blog posts from that feed. It’s a minor shame that clicking embedded links in posts ignores my browser settings and brings up IE rather than Firefox. Still, plenty of other apps do that too.
My personal preference for an additional feature for both iPodder and Doppler is support for the PCNT (play counter) ID3 tag. I strongly believe that any podfetcher should allow the option of setting this counter to 0 for every downloaded MP3 file, so that players can sensibly increase the count and transfer utilities can use it to indicate whether a file has been listened to or not.
It occurs to me that fetching enclosures from a RSS feed is conceptually very similar to fetching emails from a IMAP or POP mailbox. Given that similarity, I can’t help expecting the same kind of facilities as provided by any decent email client. Mark as read/listened, mark as unread/unlistened, folder browsing, customisable display of metadata and ID3 tags, sorting/filtering options, and so on. Both these applications have along way to go to reach this richness of facilities.
As you may have guessed by this point, I’m slightly more impressed by Doppler than by iPodder. If I could, I’d like to move over. The trouble is that I have a lot of feeds in iPodder, which stores its feed information in a decidedly non-standard format, and (as far as I can tell) provides nothing like OPML export. If I could get the feeds into OPML it looks like Doppler could import them.
If anyone has got this far, and knows of a way to extract feed information from iPodder in a way that would work in Doppler, please let me know. Thanks!
