Thursday, March 03, 2005

My Podcasting Story: Getting Started as a Listener, Applications for Jaguar

The latest issue of Wired, with a special section of the future of radio, finally piqued my interest in podcasting enough to give it a go (at least as a listener). One of my favorite sites, BoardGameGeek has been offering an almost-weekly podcast for the last six months, and I decided that my recent aquisition of an iPod shuffle deserved some indie talk radio to fill it.

Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, I've discovered that all of the Mac applications listed at iPodder.org (the definitive starting place for podcasts) require Mac OS X 10.3 to run. Even if they don't list system requirements, all of the freeware and commercial software, including the natural choice of iPodder itself, either crash when you run them or simply fail to install.

The solution? Well, what I've found to be the best RSS aggregator out there, NetNewsWire from Ranchero Software, has released a new beta of version 2.0, which includes support for downloading enclosures, and it runs great on my OS X 10.2.8 system. After subscribing to a few podcast feeds (I chose the above mentioned BoardGameGeek feed, Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, and The Laporte Report), I let NetNewsWire do its thing--it downloaded a few recent mp3s of shows, created playlists in iTunes for them, and transferred them into iTunes (in the NNW preferences, I had all the mp3s put into playlists named after their feeds, and set the genre field on all of them to "Podcast"). I created a Smart Playlist to dig out all files with the Podcast genre with a playcount of 0--that way, I have a list of the ones I haven't yet heard, ready to drag onto the shuffle, and NetNewsWire will happily chug along in the background looking for new episodes. I chose the playcount restriction because the iPod shuffle updates the playcount without updating the Last Played field.

If I had a different iPod, I could choose to have my Smart Playlist automatically synced whenever I plug the sucker in, but not so with the shuffle. As is, I have to add them manually, and then use Autofill to fill up the rest of the space with random songs.

The only problem at the moment is that my iPod shuffle doesn't seem to be updating the playcount field. I'm guessing this is because all I've tested so far are episodes of BoardGameGeek, which average over an hour long each--I can't listen to one in full in one sitting. Perhaps the shuffle isn't updating the playcount because I'm often shutting it off in mid-episode, and resuming later. Do I have to listen to an entire show without turning the shuffle off to get a playcount update? Stay tuned for further testing: the Adam Curry and Leo Laporte episodes are considerably shorter.