iTunes 4.9 with podcasting
1,025 words, 1 image(updated)
iTunes 4.9 is out, and the big new feature is built-in podcasting support. This means you can subscribe to a programme, and it will automatically download in the background and show up in your library when new content is available. If you have a portable MP3 player, new podcasts will be uploaded to it when you synchronise.
Various applications conspired with iTunes to do this in the past, but being built in makes it a bit more seamless and a bit easier to set up.
I had a bit of a play, and here are my initial opinions:
The “proper” way to find and subscribe to podcasts is via the iTunes music store. I didn’t spend long with this, but it wasn’t instantly obvious to me how to find podcasts other than the small selection of popular ones on the front page. I need to look at this more closely. iTunes Music Store — which I’ve not used in anger before, not being interested in paying money for intangible DRM’d music files — is like a graphics-heavy web page, and performs correspondingly.
No doubt it won’t be long until Apple adds pay podcasts to its portfolio.
The other way to subscribe to a podcast is to supply a URL directly. This option is accessible via the “Advanced” menu, which is not where I would have expected it to be, but there you go.
The de-facto standard for transferring sets of RSS subscriptions around is OPML, so I was disappointed not to find a way of importing or exporting OPML of podcast subscriptions. Instead I had to manually copy URLs from my iPodder subscriptions, one by one.
The “check for new podcasts” options are restricted to “Daily”, “Hourly” or “manual”. I would have liked to have seen somewhere in between, or at least the ability to specify a time for the daily check (my preference is for a nightly check, so I’m up to date in the morning).
Once subscribed, podcasts appear in a special panel of their own, distinct from the library. I find the interface for this panel a little bewildering, but I suspect it will make perfect sense to all the people who seem to think the rest of iTunes makes sense. (see update below).
There is an option to delete podcasts once they’ve been listened to. This is a great start, and something that was missing from iPodder. There’s also an option to keep only the latest episode from a given subscription. What I’d really like to see is something akin to TiVo’s expiration management.
In case you’ve never seen a TiVo — recordings are marked with a “keep until at least…” date, which is set to a default number of days from recording, but can be overridden by the user. After that date, the recording is not necessarily deleted, but is marked as a candidate for deletion, and is labelled as such in the user interface. When space is needed for new recordings, these are the recordings that are deleted. If this sounds confusing, believe me, the user interface makes it simple.
This would need to be tweaked a little for podcasts, but it’s a good model to start with. It would be fantastic if something like TiVo’s “suggestions” was also implemented, so that when you run out of recordings you explicitly asked for, there’s a collection of stuff you might like based on your choices so far, ready and waiting.
It’s great to see Apple embracing this technology and bringing it to the mainstream. Even though I’m not a great fan of iTunes in general, I recommend you give this a go.
Update: I’m revisiting what I said about the interface not making a lot of sense to me. I decided to try and work it all out. First things first: let’s look at the help file.
Open help, click “What’s new in iTunes” It says:
Using iTunes 4.9 you can:
Browse, subscribe, and listen to podcasts
Podcasts are downloadable radio-style audio shows delivered by the iTunes Music Store or over the Internet.
Learn more
So, I click “Learn more”, and it says:
About podcasts
Podcasts are downloadable radio-style shows. You can browse and download podcasts at the iTunes Music Store. You can download individual podcast episodes or subscribe to podcasts so they are automatically downloaded to iTunes as they become available. If you know the Internet address of a podcast, you can also subscribe to it using that.
Podcasts are different from Internet radio stations. Radio content is streamed over the Internet. Podcast episodes are downloaded to your computer and you can transfer them to an iPod.
Tell me more
Very informative. That’s told me what I can do. Now to find out how to do it. I click “Tell me more”.
No matching help topics were found
If you’re having trouble finding information, try using different words to describe what you want to know. You can type a few words, a phrase, or a sentence.
This is indicative of pretty much all of the iTunes help. It’s full of all the great things you can do, but really quite light on how to go about doing it. But that’s OK, because it’s all so wonderfully intuitive, right? Well, here’s a screenshot of the podcast display:
What do those blue dots mean? I have absolutely no idea. What does the “!” mean? Actually if I click on it, it tells me about a download error, but the documentation didn’t tell me that, and clicking on the blue dots (which due its position, the “!” is surely a special case of), does nothing, so it’s only a grim determination to try everything that’s even led me to try.
The whole of iTunes is like this. Please, just sit someone down for a week and have them document it. Or would that ruin sales for “The Missing Manual“? A telling title if ever there was one, and a book that Apple has the gall to sell in its own shops.
Ah well, I’ve managed to turn around what was largely a positive piece about Apple adopting podcasting, and turned it into a rant. Never mind. I’ve been holding back on iTunes for ages (mostly because there’s lots to criticise and I’m not sure how to structure it).
June 29th, 2005 at 19:21
Helpful Mat Simpson points out on the Flickr page that the blue dots mean there are “freshly downloaded” podcasts in that section. Watch this space to find out how he managed to find that out.