So I know I’ve mentioned 
podcasting before. Listening to podcasts has become a little bit of an obsession for me. The trick is to get the audio files from the Internet and onto your iPod (or other music player). For that you need a podcasting client. The one I use is called iPodderX and it runs on Macintosh OS X. This is probably one of the better clients I’ve seen and it just added the feature I wanted which now makes it the best client I’ve seen.
What you do with a client is tell it what feeds (shows) you want to listen to and it gets them for you. It’ll check every few hours pulling down new files for you and put them into a directory and/or itunes for you. iPodderX does all this and more…
Why is iPodderX the best OS X client?
It’ll stick the audio files in custom categories for you (I use this to build my “smart” playlists).
It will put them in Custom Folders (or create a folder for each day).
It’ll download by keyword (say you listen to the One Minute Tip and you only want tips dealing with PhotoShop you just put that in the keyword field).
It’ll let you search the podcast directory right from the program.
It’ll convert the files directly to Bookmarkable AAC files (you want this since the iPod is smart enough to use the bookmark to start you up right where you left off, even if you’ve gone and listened to other songs). This is the newest feature that make it the best IMHO.
It’ll grab images and put them into iPhoto for you.
It’ll also grab movie files (if you like).
Honestly, I don’t like the way they create the AAC files (the way they have iTunes do it and you can’t adjust settings) but since they do it for me (and I never adjusted the settings) and I don’t have to I can live with it!
I want a few features to change the audio file ID tags (since many shows don’t use them and it’s hard to find files) with renaming, inserting the date and a few little twists like that and it will be perfect…
I have been working with podcasts as well, but as a PC guy (really, the assumulation is not as painful as you would think ;)) and lacking an iPod I still have to do a lot of things manually. Not necessarily a big deal, but I would like to get things done more automatically.
The big problem with automating my podcasts is mostly my MP3 player size. My current player is only 256 meg. I am going to get a new one soon, but I prefer to have music for my walks and podcasts for my commute. I’m probably going to end up with 2 players.
My big complaint is moving items off the player for those of us with smaller players, and I would imagine even iPods. Adam Curry hit the nail on the head when he said we needed content management.
With an iPod device and the smart lists in iTunes (and a client which lets you created a category) you do do some crazy things for moving files around like:
1) A list with the last 25 files that are in the category ‘podcast’.
2) A list with the last three (or oldest 3) files with ‘DSC’ in the title (daily source code)
3) And you can even say exclude files I’ve listened to already so the next time you sync you’ll still have 3 but not the ones you listened to already! (This is great for low storage devices!)
And then what you can is sync JUST those categories with your iPod device (and of course your music or audio books too).
Not to push the iPod but I don’t think any other player syncs as well with iTunes and iTunes has great benefits.
I don’t benefit from all the iTunes features, my laptop is kinda my main machine and I don’t have 60 GB of storage to store all my songs and my podcasts and (of course) the computer files. So I do more of a manual sync (iTunes needs a category that says: “leave this alone and don’t worry if it’s not on my computer category”) or else it would delete my music when syncing with my laptop that doesn’t have my 500 CDs on it…
Hello, Gary!
Thanks for the kind words about iPodderX!
I wanted to let you know that you _can_ adjust the AAC bitrate settings, just not from within iPodderX itself. iPodderX will use whatever bit rate you have already set for AAC in iTunes. So, if you want your bit rate to be, say, 96kbps, simply change the AAC setting in iTunes and the next time iPodderX converts it will use that setting.
Unfortunately, Apple does not allow the changing of this number externally, so there’s no way to put that preference in iPodderX itself.
Thanks!
August Trometer
iPodderX