Re: [Banshee-List] Podcast support

[Josiah Ritchie <josiah ritchie gmail com>]

> On 2/1/06, Mike Urbanski <urbanskm msoe edu> wrote:
> P.S.  I'm interested in individual podcast usage reports!

Thanks for your interest, brace yourself, I may have written more than
you were expecting. . .

> *How many feeds are you currently subscribe to?

51, but some are no longer active. I need to clean it up. I also have
some on odeo that I haven't yet moved over to podnova too.

> *Which format(s) (Atom, RSS vx.x, OPML, etc)?

Mostly RSS. I use podnova to keep track of them across computers and
use their OPML:
http://www.podnova.com/index_podcatcher_opml.srf?userguid=989741225aa996f0386c7e16cd24d626
RSS: http://www.podnova.com/index_podcatcher.srf?userguid=989741225aa996f0386c7e16cd24d626

Feel free to look at those links to see what I listen to.

> *How many podcasts do you listen to in an average week?

Varies, but when I can, I catch at least 30 up to 50 or more. I don't
own an iPod so I listen to them as I work on my work box.

> *How long are the podcasts?

Most of them are 1/2 hour to an hour long, but I have several under 5
minutes that I like to setup as comments between the hour long shows.

> *Is the content available available through other mediums (radio, TV,
> print)

No, with the exception of NPR content and podcasts that have been
picked up by satellite radio, oh and SlashDot Review is reading of the
slashdot site.

> *What podcast clients are good, which ones suck and why?

bashpodder is good (I used it with Amarok to drop podcasts into a
directory that Amarok was setup to scan frequently. I'm now using the
File System Monitor for this.) Bash podder is easy to setup in a cron
job to have it pickup all my podcast interests overnight. I have it
run at 3 in the morning and I usually have plenty good stuff to listen
to when I get to work in the morning. I miss the menu option in Amarok
to scan for new files. (Need to add that to feature requests.) If I
had an iPod (more interested in an iRiver), I'd want it to
automatically load the latest show from selected podcasts onto the
iRiver so I could grab it for the commute to work.

podnova has a custom client mostly based on juice and I was very
unhappy with that. It isn't stable and the UI seems overdone without
the ability to cron it and such.

iTunes makes me grumpy. Maybe I'm weird, but my limited experience
with it, I didn't like it. When I returned to see what they do with
podcast's my opinion didn't improve. If I had to choose between that
and Amarok, I'd go Amarok.

> *Should a client come with default feeds?
> *If so which?

Maybe one or two, preferably family-friendly ones. I think this one
would tickle about anyone and not so active that their hard drive
would fill up without them knowing:
http://www.godcast.org/categories/drFloyd/rss.xml

> I'm interested in just about anything you find interesting about
> podcasting.

If I could do anything, I'd want to be able to automatically set the
id3 tags on podcasts that don't do it right. Many don't have the
author, titles, album pics and stuff like that right. If you could let
me script that in I'd be really impressed, but maybe that would be way
to cluttered. I'd certainly understand not wanting to add this mess.

One thing that bash podder didn't do that I like about juice is
deleting files after X number of days. Automatically cleaning out old
podcasts is great so I don't have to deal with my home directory
maxing out.

A couple times, I've run into podcasts that advertise only an iTunes
compatible feed link. A friend showed me that this link, when loaded
into iTunes, will provide a generic XML style link. If your podcast
client automatically dug that out for me, I'd really appreciate it.
It's a hassle, I could script it, but . . . :-)

JSR/