Congratulations on your new iPod, part two
Whoops! I really was lazy yesterday. I spent my vacation in an inexpensive way: Battling my way up the underworld ladder and battling the living nightmares of an ancient druid. But as for your new iPod …
It was the word of the year, and if the jury’s still out as to whether podcasting will eventually become a major way radio and television-style content is released (NPR certainly seems to think it will be), there’s still a world full of great free content out there for you to have automagically delivered to your computer and, thus, to synch up with your iPod.
In other words, podcasting is comparable to what your TiVo does for you. Content that you want, including an increasing amount of professional radio content, is automatically pulled onto your hard drive by special podcasting software. You can then listen to it on your computer, or synch it up with your iPod or other MP3 player.
iTunes now includes podcasting capabilities, and it’s probably the easiest way to get podcasts on your computer: Just find a podcast in the iTunes directory, find it on the net and plug in the download address or find the podcast’s Web page and click the appropriate “add to iTunes” button, and you’re done. New podcasts will arrive on your computer as they’re released.
I don’t like the iTunes software myself. It keeps podcasts segregated, both in iTunes and on my iPod, and lets me do fewer things with podcasts than I might want. (I was getting podcasts before iTunes added the capability, and the fact that I couldn’t smoothly integrate the content together seemed silly to me.) Instead, I use Juice, which is an insanely easy to use cross-platform podcasting program. I have it drop the files in my iTunes directory under My Music under the My Documents folder. Once there, it’s integrated with the other iTunes files.
Once Juice downloads a podcast, I manually set the podcast’s genre to “Podcast,” if it’s one of the few that doesn’t automatically set it that way. I then have a “smart playlist” in iTunes that grabs all of the MP3 files genre, that have a play count equal to zero. This lets me use my iTunes/iPod just like a radio: I play it, it vanishes from the playlist, and I don’t have to worry about listening to stuff twice when casually enjoying it. But the files are still there on my iPod (you can find them under Genre, Podcast) if I still want to listen to something again. I have a lot of music shows that I keep indefinitely, for instance.
Next up, my current podcast subscriptions.
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