I enjoy podcasts, on those occasions when I have time to role play a radio station manager. Most of the programs I listen to are no more than five minutes long (Meet the Press is the longest at fifty-plus minutes) and when they are done I don't necessarily want to hear the previous episodes. So I'm forced to go back into iTunes and play the next newly downloaded program.
What I really want is a way to structure or schedule my subscriptions in a way that allows me to play these programs without needing to manually manage the process — thereby creating my own public broadcasting station (sans the bi-annual membership drives). To date I have not found a way to do this.
I would love an application, web based or not, that would let me prioritize the listening order of all of my podcast subscriptions à la Tivo's recording priority. Each day this app would provide a way, either through a larger file or a streaming feed, to play back these programs back-to-back in the priority I've arranged. Add more cowbell and this program would include chapters so that I can skip back and forth between programs.
Maybe this already exists and I just haven't heard about it yet or I need to get Ryan cranking on a new application, he's been milking it lately anyway.
Also, this entry has been edited no less than fifty-four times. Switching to decaf is now on the to-do list.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
I understand what you are talking about. I, too, wanted to get a playlist of certain podcasts that I listen to every week and not have to make this playlist by hand each time.
The closest I have come is a smart playlist that captures only podcasts that have a play count of 0. From there you just list off the podcast artist names you don't want in the list. I have also found it helpful to have it exclude video podcasts, since I don't have a 5G iPod.
Here comes the manual labor. Since I don't always want to listen to them in the order they come into the playlist, I do have to go in and manually set the order. However, it is alot easier to just switch around an already created playlist, then to have to create one from scratch.
I call this playlist 'A1 Podcasts' so it is at the top of my playlist directory and easily accessible on the iPod and iTunes. Oh, and if you listen to a podcast elsewhere and need to get it out of your smart playlist, you can use this handy little applescript to set a new play count for the track.
Hope this helps.
Re: editing - Maybe you need more cowbell and less caffeine.
it doesn't seem like that would be horribly difficult to set up. would you be interested in using a web app to set up your feeds and then have an auto-generated playlist based on your prefs? would those feeds need to synch on an actual i-pod or would listening to the feeds through the web app be sufficient?
What is a podcast? Does it have to do with fishing?
Yep. Pretty much playing golf everyday now. The Good Life.
Thanks, Airbag!
Brian, thanks for the tip, I tried it this morning and that's close to what I want. It's been a while since I've scripted anything in an operating system (not since the Amiga 500) and wonder if I could do some Automator actions to sort the list so that all new podcasts playback in the right sequence.
I'm glad you found the smart playlist tip handy, Greg. I'm sure you could do some applescript wizardry to sort the playlist, however, not being a scripter myself, I couldn't point you to a script for that. If you figure one out, let us know!
in Poland there is more and more fields of golf – therefore this will be a little less dear..this will really be the Good Life.