::A Geek in Korea::

The reason I got into podcasting quickly was because I found a tool that allowed me to quickly add different show feeds quickly. I started using podcastready because it came recommended, had a Linux and Windows version, and did a pretty good job. I liked being able to plug in one version on any computer with a USB cable and sync up since the software sits on the mp3 player itself. It came in really useful in Europe when we would get access to a local computer for using the Internet.

It started behaving strangely this month. It would stop connecting to the service that checked for new shows, or it would eat my feeds. I’d only notice after a few days that my normal shows had been replaced by “ESPN DAILY” or “THE NASCAR” podcast. Those were the defaults that the program came with that I had immediately deleted when I started using the program.

Other shows I had been listening to for some time started disappearing. I was noticing less and less of my feeds appearing each time I synced. Something is afoot at the podcastready service, and I had to export my partial feed list and look for an alternative.

I had been archiving the feeds from Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Koreanclass101 on my local machine with gPodder. I hadn’t moved my other feeds over to gPodder because I hadn’t figured out how to keep a set of feeds archived while still sending over daily podcasts I like and can delete after listening to them.

It turns out there was a setting to “lock” downloaded files, and you can set which feeds are synced when you add them. There are tons of features like downloading files to different individual folders (off) or having naming rules (useful) for files so that you can better manage them in a file tree mode. I think I can comprehensively manage all my files and feeds and do everything I want with gPodder, but I’ll have to do it from home.

There are other podcast aggregators for Linux, and I could potentially use a Java based alternative to run it on any machine like jPodder or Juice too. Right now though I’ve got gPodder set up just how I want it. It had a consistent interface, and was a standalone application that did one thing very well with a GUI. This is all you can ask for in an application this specialized.

Anyway, I’ve got a twenty-two channel aggretation of podcasts at the moment, and I know a few are missing.