/dev/zero

Now that I’ve been playing around with it for a couple of hours and actually using it to listen to a few podcasts, subscribed to a bunch, etc, I have more, more educated, thoughts.

1. Forget what I said earlier about not converting to AAC. While everything I said was true (there’s no facility to automatically convert to AAC, doing the conversion is a pain because it convets to m4A instead of m4B, the manual conversion from A to B is a pain), it’s completely unnecessary. Just as the difference in iTunes / iPod’s handling of m4a v. m4b is entirely within the software, so is the handling of “music” v. “podcasts”, in mp3 format. The iPod (and presumably iTunes 4.9) handles an mp3 “podcast” the same way it handles an m4b. It will bookmark your file and resume where you left off if you stop it and listen to something else and come back later. Yay Apple! They got that one right. mp3 is smaller than aac (all files I converted to aac ended up being larger) and that’s the native format of almost all podcasts. This means less disc space, less bandwidth and I don’t have to wait for the terrible CPU suck while iTunes converts the file.
2. As I put in the edit to the last post, no Bittorrent support.
3. It appears if you are a podcaster and you want to have your podcast listed in the Apple Music Store (ie: in the podcast directory in iTunes) you have to have an iTunes Music Store account. These are only available to residents of certain countries, so if you don’t live in the US, Canada or (the UK?), you’re SOL. Your podcast doesn’t get listed. An Australian podcaster was complaining about this in the support forums. I’d say it’s a legit complaint. Will Apple simply open membership to everyone? Open membership to everyone but not allow downloads of purchased music, to comply with copyright regulations? Create a “podcasters” account type that is only good for adding / editing podcast listings?
   Better yet, just let anyone with an Apple ID list a podcast, instead of having to have a Music Store account.
   However, there’s more to this than it seems: “Life Stories Radio“, a podcast out of Sydney, Australia, is in the iTunes podcast directory / iTunes Music Store. The Music Store got it’s initial directory entries from the ipodder.org directory. The question is, will it continue to update it’s offerings from ipodder.org? Thus, if you’re an Australian podcaster, if you list your podcast in ipodder.org’s directory, will you show up in the Music Store automatically?
4. Like just about every other podcatching software out there, there’s no per-podcast settings. All the settings for scheduling downloads, how long to keep them, etc, are all or nothing. The only per-podcast settings available is to control which podcasts get synced automatically with the iPod.
5. You have the option of setting the frequency of podcast downloads: Every day, every hour, every week, manually. You do not get to set when the podcasts are downloaded. If you select “daily”, iTunes decides for you what time of day. On the surface this would suggest that every iTunes 4.9 process will try to download podcasts at the same time every day (and even the differing time zones doesn’t avoid this: I’m in Central Daylight Time. My iTunes says it will download at 7:00 PM. Dave Slusher’s says it will download at 8:00PM. I believe he’s in Eastern time. That means they will both fire at the same time.) This effectivly creates a DDOS on a podcaster’s server.
   However, there is some evidence to suggest that iTunes actually changes the time it will do it’s download run each day, setting it to a pseudo-random time after each run. Sounds like, just as it did today when it was released, when all those new installs hit their first daily download mark all the podcasters will get DDOS’d, but after that each iTunes will be set to a different time and after a couple of days things should settle out. Still, it would have been nice if Apple had given a field where the user could set a time that was best for them.
6. No facility, it appears, to add old, already downloaded, podcasts to the Podcast menu. Normally this wouldn’t be too big a deal, other than loss of sorting / searching features, but that also means old mp3 downloads get treated like standard “music” mp3s, not like “podcast” mp3s with bookmarking. Apple: how ’bout adding some facility to tag a file as a “podcast”?

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