03.10.05

RSS and Podcasts

Tagged as Apple, Podcasts, Software

Update: Since writing this entry, I’ve received feedback from the developers of three of the programs mentioned below (two in the comments, and one by email). I’ve also noticed a couple other errors that no one had called me on yet. I’ve inserted updates inline based on the information they sent. Obviously, the fact that they took the time to get back to me about the issues I had and the features I wanted is a very good sign, and something I encourage my readers to consider when deciding on a podcast client (or any other software).

As you might guess from the new podcast category in the sidebar, I finally got bit by the podcast bug. It’s not enough that I have an RSS reader open all day bringing a few dozen feeds in on a regular basis; now I’m filling my iPod with even more blather from around the web. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, podcasts are like audio blogs—regularly-updated audio content that can be downloaded automatically via RSS feed and optionally sent to iTunes to be synchronized with an iPod (or, of course, just listened to at home). Some are professionally produced, like the BBC’s In Our Time, and some are just a guy in his bedroom with a plastic microphone, like the Singularity Podcast. Most fall somewhere in between.

But this new interest brought with it a dilemma: which Podcast client should I use? There are several clients available for OS X … and I’ve now tried most of them. This is my report.

I noticed, first of all, that iPodder seemed to be the default recommendation from a lot of people—due in part, I’m sure, to its status as one of the first clients, its cross-platform compatibility, and its price tag (free as in beer and free as in speech). I’m all about open source, but I must confess a certain bias against GUI applications based on scripting languages—too often it’s slow and fails to take advantage of the Cocoa libraries, leaving the user with a non-standardized interface. I’d heard a lot of good things about it, but in the end I decided to try it only as a last resort. Note: in the original version of this entry I confused iPodder with jPodder somehow (I guess they look kind of similar in certain fonts). iPodder is written in Python, while jPodder is written in Java. Sorry about that.

Next I turned to iPodderX—a very slick-looking piece of software that, unfortunately, failed to live up to its potential. I don’t know if it was something unique about my system that caused it, but iPodderX crashed on me a lot. When it worked it worked very well, but nearly every time I closed it, it failed to reopen unless I trashed the prefs. A couple times I managed to get it to work by just deleting some of the entries in the subscription and history files, but not always. Anyway, unacceptable. I moved on. One of the developers of iPodderX has commented on this, and I intend to get back to him to see if we can figure out what was causing this problem. I’ll keep you posted.

I was interested in trying PoddumFeeder partly because it’s entirely written in AppleScript Studio, and I’ve been curious lately about what could be done with that platform. PoddumFeeder is a good client with some excellent features—one that I particularly liked was the ability to automatically remove podcasts from the iTunes library after they’ve been listened to. Unfortunately, limitations in AppleScript itself make PoddumFeeder a lot less useful than it could be. For example, it can only handle one task at a time, meaning that while it’s updating, for example, none of its menus are accessible. You can’t even scroll down the list of feeds, and the only indication that it hasn’t locked up entirely is a spinning icon—there’s no progress bar. Once I tried to download a podcast from IT Conversations, walked away for three hours, and returned to find PoddumFeeder still trying to access the feed. I had to force-quit, and when I opened it up again it didn’t remember any of the feeds I’d already downloaded. Robust it most certainly is not.

Podcast Tuner bills itself as “Absolutely the best downloader for podcasts out there,” but again I found too many bugs for my comfort level. The bugs started with the integrated ipodder.org podcast directory—certain categories and feeds failed to load with a message telling me to reload or try again later, while others loaded without a problem. Maybe the XML parser is a little too strict. The software felt clunky to me, and again I had stability issues, so I gave up.

Finally, I decided to take a look at NetNewsWire 2.0 Beta, and at last I’d found a winner. This was a tough decision for me, because I’ve been an avid Shrook user for about a year now—but Shrook doesn’t do podcasts yet (Note: Graham says via email that podcast support is planned, but the top priority right now is improving performance) to give NNW a try. Although it’s labeled Beta software and the web page starts off with a big fat warning about “nasty, vicious bugs with great big, sharp teeth,” this was by far the most stable podcast client I tried—it hasn’t crashed on me once so far. Furthermore, it handles my text RSS (and Atom) feeds as well as Podcasts, so there’s no need to run separate clients for the two types of content. I do have a few complaints: there’s no way I could find to tell it to download, for example, only the most recent file from a feed, or only podcasts uploaded in the past week—options that are particularly useful when adding a new feed to the subscription list. And I’d really like to see NetNewsWire include PoddumFeeder’s option to automatically remove already-heard podcasts from the iTunes library (I’m planning on writing an AppleScript to handle this, but I shouldn’t have to). Overall, though, I found it to be exactly the sort of robust, stable, feature-packed software I’ve become accustomed to since switching to Mac a year and a half ago.

It’s important to remember that as of this writing, only version 2.0 Beta of NetNewsWire has the ability to download podcasts automatically. Previous versions also lacked Atom feed support, which was one of the reasons I chose Shrook over NNW when deciding on a feedreader last year. But in spite of being Beta software, and in spite of its relatively hefty $24.95 price tag, it’s the best option in its category for OS X right now. Highly recommended. (I originally had the wrong price in this paragraph—the Beta version is $24.95; it’s version 1.0 that’s $39.95. Sorry about the confusion—I’m waiting until I get paid on the fifteenth to register my copy, so I was just going by the first price I saw on the web site.)

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