itunes and podcast, a match made in hell!

I am sold on podcasts, they are a good source of music, news, videos... really anything. So much to choose from too. Itunes is still unrivalled when it comes to music management, but maybe not podcasts. At one time itunes was ok, it could handle my demands for podcast feeds, but now I have gathered a whole heap of subscriptions and notably more videos like Diggnation. This means larger and more downloads via itunes, which is annoying if the spinning beachball of death hangs about while what you really opened itunes for was to play some music! This is all the more painfull if, like me, you store you library on your external hard drive linked in on a wireless network... in one word: BUFFERING!

So I have tried a few things like, mypodder, which was rubbish (just seems to freeze every time) It sounded good, with it's promise to work on anything, even a usb stick, and download straight to your mp3 player. This means storing the software on you ipod or whatever and running it from. Not sure what i did wrong but it never did that for me. It did work from my laptop hard drive though. The User interface was dodgy, not easy to understand.

I tried Juice, this was quite good. Looks like an old itunes, only thing was it stores the files with odd numberwang prefixes.


The winner for me I think was Pod Nova. You can search, subscribe and dowload feeds. Install the desktop client and it asks for your login details, syncs with your selections online and downloads them. It looks neat and uses a browser access you account offline.

A good companion for this is floola which allows you to load the files on to your mp3 without itunes. Added bonus to this software: It allows video uploads, obviously a must for video podcasts. Only thing is you might have to make playlists for the stuff you want to load first in tunes.