who's into podcasts? Favorites?

[Gardnr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 I found that with a big list of podcasts such as Gardnr has, it gets to be a bit of a hassle to locate the latest ones, and move those into your iPod. iTunes seems to keep things grouped by podcast, and you can only sort within that grouping.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here but I just keep the Podcasts (in iTunes) sorted by release date (but they stay grouped by Podcast too) and select the ones I want to listen to and drag them to the IPOD. I delete Podcasts as I go along after I've listened to them. Works for me. But I'll take a look at what you're suggesting and see how it works.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 Got a good alternative?

I use windows media player. In six feet of snow, uphill, both ways.

Its complicated, hard to figure out, and doesnt work half the time.

And I like it that way.

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gardnr Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here but I just keep the Podcasts (in iTunes) sorted by release date (but the stay grouped by Podcast too) and select the ones I want to listen to and drag them to the IPOD. I delete Podcasts as I go along after I've listened to them. Works for me. But I'll take a look at what you're suggesting and see how it works.

(but they stay grouped by Podcast too) - right, and this is what bugged me (but maybe does not bug other people).

If I have 20 podcasts subscriptions for example, and 12 of them got updated, I need to go through, find, and select those 12 new ones, one-by-one, out of the 20. With the smart playlist, those 12 are all at the top of the list - I don't have to search among the 20 podcasts to find them.

If you delete everything as you go, maybe this is no big deal. I guess you can just copy them all over, it would skip duplicates anyway. I have a ton of old ones that I have not gotten to, but plan to (someday...). And a bunch that I have listened to, but keep in case I want to review them.

You must be one of those 'clean desk' people I'm not!

-ERD50

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by cute fuzzy bunny I use windows media player. In six feet of snow, uphill, both ways. Its complicated, hard to figure out, and doesnt work half the time. And I like it that way.

Well that explains a lot!

But I didn't see podcast support in WMP. So don't you need to add something like Juice to it?

-ERD50

[Gardnr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 You must be one of those 'clean desk' people

Oh God no! You should see my garage!

For some reason though I keep my iTunes neat and tidy.

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 don't you need to add something like Juice to it?

Orange juice. Tomato juice. Whatever it takes.

Actually you might be surprised at the range of WMP plug ins, from free to about $50, that will allow you to subscribe to particular podcasts, have the latest versions downloaded to your PC and automatically update your player...ipod or 'other'...automatically.

[Sarah in SC]

My iTunes is pretty tidy, but I try to keep the list manageable by not taking on too many of them, and only keeping the most recent five.
I am particularly enjoying the Slate Explainer Podcast, it pulls some random bit from the news and talks about it. The Black Hole one was quite interesting.
Also for the refurbs, I don't know if I heard about them here or not, but I bought a refurb 20gig (I think that was 4th gen, but don't swear to it) for $100 from eritech.com. Great price, good product, no problems with delivery. Nice if you don't need the latest/greatest, but you want a decent amount of memory. The 20gig holds about 5,000 songs.

[JB]

The Cato Daily Podcast is very good. I also like this american life, and some of the tech oriented podcasts.

I've been using Juice for awhile now. I got frustrated with iTunes making my computer unstable. The nice thing about Juice is that it's lightweight (all it does is download podcasts.) I don't think it solves the iTunes problem described above. Each podcast gets downloaded to a folder. I sort by date, and move the new ones over to the player, and delete the old ones. There is an option to run a command script after each download, so the process can be automated if you want to put in the effort.

[Jeb-NY]

Don't forget pod books. Some are just bad but some are very good. Several authors have given away their books as pod casts and then had them released by a publisher for $$ as audio books and then as hard backs. Seems backwards but they have been good sellers. Many authors have their own sites and have some extra commentary with each installment, Podiobooks has put a lot of these together just like an audio books with the extras removed, most are free or you can make a doation. You can find the direct podbook feeds in iTunes doing a search for the author or genre you want in the pod cast section of the iTune store, again most are free.

Vanguard also has a podcast.

Jeb