/dev/zero

Apple just released iTunes 4.9, which has podcasting support built in. Now you can subscribe to and download podcasts through the iTunes music store interface.
If you own an iPod, be sure to also grab the iPod updater software 2005-06-26, which which installs the needed functions on your iPod.
This is why I got an iPod in the first place. Now it all comes together.
Thoughts on iTunes 4.9 so far:

The minuses -
1. No support for converting to aac? Apple, what were you thinking? If I’m listening to an hour long podcast, there’s a good chance I can’t listen to the whole thing in one sitting. I don’t want to have to start from the beginning again when I come back to it. That’s what m4b is for. If you’d been really smart, you’d have set up something in the interface that pre-converted everything for us, so the file we download in the first place is an m4b (taking a page from the IT Conversations book.) I can understand where this might be problematic, since Apple isn’t actually hosting the files, making the conversion is CPU intensive (just take a look at how much CPU iTunes takes up under windows when converting from mp3 to aac. Forget about getting anything else done.
2. While you can manually convert your podcasts to aac, and they’ve add a new “podcast” quality level to the AAC quality selection, they haven’t fixed my chief complaint with this: it converts it to an m4A. To make it an m4B, you still have to go through the extra steps of right clicking, select “show file”, manually renaming the extionsion, close the window, right clicking again, select “get info”, get the error dialog that it can’t find the file and would you like to locate it manually, click yes, click on the m4b file, the close the file info window. Considering the only difference between an m4a and an m4b is the extension and how the software handles it, based on that extension, there should be some provision in iTunes to select which form of aac you want to convert to.
3. Along with the above: when you (manually) convert a podcast from mp3 to aac, the new aac version of the podcast appears in the library menu, not the podcast menu. You lose all of the advantages spelled out below.
4. FINDING the podcast you want seems to be hit or miss. There’s plenty of search functions and so on, but let’s face it, it’s the Apple music store. Not the best layout.
5. “Download all episodes” appears to be broken. I selected this, and the first podcast I subscribed to after doing so only downloaded the most recent episode automatically.
6. No facility to tag podcasts you already have in your library as “podcasts” to be handled like all the podcasts subscribed to using the new interface. While it obviously can’t associate the files with a given podcast, it would be nice if you could move all those files into the Podcast menu hierarchy.
7. Subscription interface: OK, subscribing is easy. But once you click “subscribe” on a podcast, it takes you to the “downloading” page that shows all your current subscriptions, all your downloaded and downloading episodes and so on. To get more subscriptions, you have to click on the “Directory” button again and navigate your way back to where you were. Apple, couldn’t you have put a checkbox or somthing, so you could select multiple podcasts, then “subscribe” all of them at once when you’re done selecting?
8. Irony of ironies: Fully half of Adam Currys’ Daily Source Codes are broken.
9. This one’s an actual bug: In the settings window, Podcasts tab, second item: “When new episodes are” with dropdown list containing “Download all”, “Download most recent one”, “Do nothing”. “When new episodes are” what? What does this setting item do? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
10. Minor nit: if you right click on an episode, select “Show description”, you get whatever “show notes” the podcaster created. Since iTunes already has a web browser built in (eg: it uses the IE API), couldn’t you have made links in the show notes clickable?

The pluses -
1. The interface for subscribing to a podcast is great. Once you’ve subscribed, selecting episodes to download is simple.
2. Once you install the iPod software update, it adds a new menu level: Podcasts. This very nicely fixes an issue I’ve had with every podcast / podcatching software I’ve tried: Munging the mp3 tags such that I can find every episode of a given podcast, in order, on my iPod (or even in iTunes). Adam Curry puts the name of each episode in the Album field, with date and episode number or some such in the Name field. Since he sometimes has guests on his show, they get listed in the Artist field with him. This makes finding all Daily Source Codes problematic with the stock menus / mp3 tags, since MOST will be under “Artist” Adam Curry, but not all. There will be literally dozens of “albums” by that artist, each “album” having exactly one track. Any “album” with a guest won’t be found under “artist” Adam Curry though. Until now the solution was to use podcatching software that creates a unique playlist for each podcast, but even then it doesn’t solve the dozens-of-albums-per-artist problem. This new menu item takes care of it.
3. Along with the ability to download podcasts and sync them to the iPod, it also includes functions for when to delete them, with options such as “Last X” episodes, “most recent” and “Unheard”, so you can automatically remove any podcast you’ve listened to. Some podcatching software has features for removing podcasts from iTunes (or WMP) under various criteria, but none of them had any concept of whether or not you’ve listened to them, since, if you’re using iTunes or WMP to do your listening, the catching software wouldn’t have any way of knowing if you’ve heard a particular podcast.
4. No longer having multiple copies of each podcast on your hard drive!
   With Doppler, it would download the podcast, then copy it to the iTunes library. This meant having at least two copies of the podcast on your had drive: the Doppler copy and the iTunes library copy. If you were converting to m4b, that was 3 copies: the original mp3, the converted m4b in Doppler and the m4b in the iTunes library. If you count the copy on your iPod itself, that’s 4. All other podcatching software I’ve found had the same problem. With iTunes doing it directly, just one copy on your hard drive. However, see my complaint above about no facility to convert formats automatically.

[Edit: Dave Slusher at Evil Genius Chronicles posts about Apple linking to his podcasts' Bittorrent feed rather than his alternate direct MP3 feed, but not including Bittorrent support. I was afraid of that. I hadn't actually added his podcast into my subscriptions yet (hadn't gotten that far down the list) but I had a feeling I would run into that. I didn't know he had a direct MP3 feed, so I'm glad I actually looked at his text blog today and saw his comments. Now when I get that far I'll know to bypass the Apple music store entry for his podcast and use the Advanced menu to add his alternate feed.
Also, Dave, you mention that your iTunes is scheduled to download every day at 8:00 PM and you can't change it, and ask if everyone else is the same. No, mine says 7:00 PM. But then, I'm in CDT. If you're in EDT, then we'd still be firing at the same time.]

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