document updated 16 years ago, on Oct 2, 2007
iTunes + iPod is really great, it has a number of advantages I haven't found elsewhere:
- I can listen to a podcast on the iPod, or on the computer, and it keeps track of which podcasts I've listened to, and which I haven't
- The software is pretty smooth and bug-free
However, there are some things I wish it could do better...
- I wish there was a better way to sort podcasts by priority... There are some podcasts I subscribe to
because I never want to miss them, but I have a bunch of other podcasts I subscribe to in case I
find myself with a lot of time on my hands and don't want to run out of content to listen to.... There should
be an easier way to separate these "must listen" podcasts from "mostly filler" podcasts.
- iTunes applies its "keep most recent episode" rule uniformly to all podcsts... There needs to
be a way to override this default for individual podcasts. For instance, The Diane Rhem show
posts two podcasts on Friday, since it has two somewhat independent one-hour shows that day.
More importantly, the International Herald Tribune posts
a completely separate .mp3 for each individual story (to make it easier for them to make the
content super-customizable without the expense of re-encoding).
It'd be nice if there were an easyish way to extract the audio from video podcasts, so I could
listen to the damn things on my Nano.... Podcasts that would do fine as audio-only, but for some
reason don't provide one:
- CNN's Late Edition (one of the sunday newsmagazines, grrrrrrr)
- Larry King
- Brian Ross investigates
I need to be able to record
specific streams, and have them added into iTunes as if they were a normal podcast. Things I'm
particularly interested in are: