[Banshee-List] Fwd: ipod support

["Mike Meiser" <groups-yahoo-com mmeiser com>]

Howdy,

I just rediscovered banshee for podcasting.

I'm a designer and I actually participate in a lot of mailing lists
for products I like. I like to be involved and at the very least
provide some useful feedback.

I'm also a videoblogger and podcaster and have been since 2004. I did
my little mart to help get MediaRSS going, and worked unofficially
have been involved in several projects from democracy player, to
Fireant.tv, blip.tv.... and am one of the founders of mefeedia.net.
Needless to say, I'm very involved in the space.

I've had a LOT of frustrations with iTunes as a podcasting aggregator
and have been searching for an alternative for over a year.

First of all, let me just say, great job to the developers of Banshee.
It's a great app. Overall I've been impressed with all the open source
alternatives, Amarok, Rhytmbox, Songbird (the newbie), and there maybe
another one or two I'm forgeting at the moment.

Generally speaking the quality and innovation is very impressive.

I recently rediscovered Banshee and I think it's a great podcast
aggregator. It's extremely simple and it fixes my two primary
annoyances with itunes (more on tha tlater). I actuallyy only have one
problem. I upgraded to iTunes 7.2 last week before I rediscovered
Banshee and it will not sync with my ipod. I guess 7.2 changed the
format meta information was stored in on the iPod.  I was primarly
just wondering if this was known and if there is an update to banshee
planed.

I guess the work around is to reformat my ipod, on a mac that still
has 7.1 and then it should sync with banshee.



There is one other thing.  Banshee could really use OPML import/
export so people using the crappy itunes can with a single quick step
import all their itunes podcast subscriptions and then ditch itunes.


What I like about podcast aggregation on banshee.

As mentioned there are two things that annoyed my about itunes.

1) iTunes does not link to the permalink for podcasts so instead of
being a single click away from any podcast and the original blog post
where I can read the show notes or comment... I have to go do a google
search.  This strikes me as needlessly assinine on apple's part, a
purely political move to keep you locked into itunes.

Banshee however fixes this... I can easily right click on any podcast
and visit the original blog post within a single click.  Thank you.

2) The other thing I like about banshee that annoys me about iTunes is
I cannot see all the latest podcasts untill AFTER I download them.
Yes... you can see the latest podcasts prior to downloading them for
each individual feed, but when you have 20, 40... or as in my case 196
podcasts you like to follow... that's 196 different individual feeds
to look at to see if there's a new podcast.   Only AFTER downoading
all podcasts can you then "sort by the latest first"...   My 196
podcasts only produce 18 new podcasts episodes a day, and I listen to
3-4 a day... I don't want nore do I need to listen to every single
podcast every single day.   What I want is to be able to... like any
good blog aggregator scan the latest posts irregardless of feed for
particularly interesting episodes.

Enter banshee... I've noticed Banshee has an "all feeds" view. And it
can be sorted by release date.  This is perfect and it allows me to
scan through all the latest podcast episodes from all my subscriptions
for the last few days an with one click download only those episodes I
want to listen to.

This has had an immediate effect on my podcast listening as I can now
see what's new instantly and download and listen to what I want to
listen to when I want to listen to it instead of downloading
everything and only then being able to read what is new.

The only other minor note is when a podcast has not been downloaded
yet the text is a little too light making it hard to read.


In summary.

Banshee is a great podcast client, extremely simple, yet does exactly
what i need it to do.  It interfaces well with podcast websites, and
allows for flexible aggregation and listening habits.  It has only the
following issues that I can see

1) needs a minor update to work with iPods that have been updated by iTunes 7.2

2) needs OPML import/export to allow iTunes user to switch easily to Banshee

3) the grey text for non-downloaded podcast episodes is to light and
thus hard to read in the podcast pane of banshee.

Keep rocking,

I hope this helps.

I look forward to following the conversation here and becoming more involved.

Also this is not something I personally am interested in, but I've
followed the popularity of Last.fm, and more recently a great
newcommer called iLike.com.  Perhaps I've overlooked it but i haven't
seen any plugins for these services in Banshee.   Audio podcasting is
not our focus at mefeedia, video podcasting is, but I do think that
plugins like this to track listenership of podcasts in applications
like iTunes and banshee among others are going to really light the
podcasting world unfire in the next year or two.   They will make
podcast listening an even more socialable experience.

Anyway,

Peace,

-Mike