A Community Of Creativity
3 Great Podcast Clients
Posted By: Rob on Jun 11, 5:52 pm
Okay, so podcasting is big, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is (if you can guess what i just quoted you win an e-cookie), but how does one go about downloading podcasts? Well, there are a number of ways.
Directly Listen Via Your Web Browser
No muss, no fuss and no heafty download. Surely listening via your browser via direct access or a Flash-based player is the simplest way. However the drawback is that you could accidentally close your browser. Another drawback is that you don’t really have good notification of new episodes upon their release, unless of course you are subscribed to the RSS feeds and keep tabs on them every day, but that can be a lot of work if you follow more than 4 or 5 podcasts. Who wants to worry about all of that?
That is where dedicated podcast clients come into play. Podcast clients allow you to subscribe to a podcast’s RSS feed (a catalog file, so to speak, that lists all -or- a portion of that podcast’s episodes) and it will do the work of checking for new episodes and downloading them to your computer. The only thing you have to do at that point is listen and enjoy the free media. Many of these clients will also clean up after itself, removing podcast that are older than a set amount of days. Below are my reviews of 3 clients.
First and foremost, iTunes.
iTunes is Apple’s Media player. It comes pre-installed on all Macintosh computers and is also available as a download for Windows XP and Vista. It has many features for organizing your music, movies, tv shows, as well as podcasts. You also have access to the iTunes Music Store, part of which is the Podcast Directory. Don’t worry about the whole “Store” thing, because downloading podcasts from the iTMS is completly free. No credit card information required. If you wish to buy music, movies or TV shows from the iTMS, however, that is a different story. But that is not the subject at hand.
Now, iTunes is not for everyone. There are some issues with iTunes running on Windows, and many people do not like how iTunes organizes audio files. Personally, I have no issues with the organizational methods iTunes employs. It sorts all of your music into a single folder called “iTunes Music Folder”, and then creates a tree of folders within it. It looks kinda of like this: iTunes Music Folder > Artist Name > Album Name > Song Files. Seems quite logical and well sorted to me. [Download iTunes Here]
If iTunes isn’t your cup of tea, there is also Juice. Formerly iPodder, Juice is a podcast download client available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux. It is free, supports 15 different languages, and is mainly designed for downloading and managing podcasts. Like iTunes, Juice also has a built-in podcast directory for finding new podcasts. However, it does not have access to Apple’s iTunes Music Store’s Podcast Directory, one of the main locations of podcast listings. [Download Juice Here]
The third podcast client is more for video podcasts. Miro, formerly Democracy Player, like Juice is also available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (with a specific version for Ubuntu). It supports High Definition video in a mulititude of formats including, but not limited to, MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media and Flash Video. Like iTunes, Miro supports resuming playback if you stop mid-way through your listening/viewing. An interesting feature of Miro is the ability to set a cut-off based on your Hard Disk space, preventing it from downloading so much video that you run out of storage space. This is helpful as computer tend to perform poorly when your hard drive runs low on storage. [Download Miro Here]
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June 24th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
podcast directory…
Couldn’t have said it any better…