Podcastplayer.org news

It looks like iPodder (probably the most popular podcatcher software) has released version 2. I’ve tried it out, and it does indeed have a bunch of major improvements:

1. + There’s much more click-though on visible details, you can easily get to and change feed properties
   - this only consist of the URL at the moment - no option to pause a feed, or apply any sort of filtering, or show accompanying blog posts/play notes, or view track metadata, or apply feed-specific scheduling, or enter user/password for an authenticated feed.

2. + The appearance is improved, with iTunes-like “stripey” lists, and (at last) a way to sort feeds
   - one of my favourite features, the big, easy, obvious, “add feed” box has been hidden, along with a move to a row of cryptic icons, with (apparently) no way of showing understandable text buttons instead.

3. + you can now click on a downloaded ‘cast to play it immediately
   - it can only play in iTunes or Windows media player. This is nonsense, I don’t tend to use either of those, preferring RealPlayer, or WinAmp, or VLC. Sure, allow me to select which type of playlist to generate, but don’t force me to use a particular player - the next version really must allow entry of an arbitrary path to a player as an “other” option.

4. + feed scanning and downloading is considerably faster and more controllable.
   - It seems to pick which ‘casts to download at random, though, I’d prefer at least some way to tell it which ones I want first, so I can listen to them while the others are still coming in.

5. + it tracks which ‘casts have been downloaded from a feed in a visible way, and allows you to select “back catalog” ‘casts for downloading along with the new stuff.
   - it doesn’t seem good at knowing the difference between tracks I have downloaded but moved out of my “incoming” area; and tracks I’ve never downloaded. Maybe that’s just because the previous version didn’t store enough data. I’ll see how I get on with this in use.

6. + best of all, I can now export/import and back up my feeds as (hopefully standard) OPML. w00t!

All in all, a definite improvement. If you use iPodder, then you should almost definately upgrade. Just remember to fully exit your old version, the installer (on Windows, at least) doesn’t seem to check, and gets in a tangle if the old one is still running.

Read more and download the latest version at iPodder, the cross-platform podcast receiver.