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Podcasting Catcher Software a work in progress.

I switched from iPodder to jPodder this last week due to having issues with iPodder not inserting Podcast into my media player. But the issue I am having with all of these podcasting catcher programs is that they are not smart enough to clean-up after themselves. So I have 2 month old content and no way to really clean those Podcast off my iPod permanently. Because as soon as I delete it from iTunes and the hard-drive the jPodder software downloads the old files again.

Podcasters are most to blame because their RSS feeds still have these old shows. Someone fix this please!

UPDATE: When your 40 gig iPod is full of music and you are using the remaining 3 gigs to hold podcast and you are down to 100 megs of available storage the only choice you have is to start unsubscribing from feeds. Someone fix this please!

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Comments (4)

Sounds like you havnt tried Doppler yet. (at least not version 1.1) http://www.dopplerradio.net/

Its not perfect of course, but it has some nice features; for instance, a history that you can edit on the fly if you want, options for linking external apps to downloaded enclosures, built in directory browsing, mp3 size capping,
id3 tag override, bunch of other cool stuff.

I must respectfully disagree with a part of what your talking about here.

I agree that the fact that jPodder re-downloads a file when it's deleted from your file-system is a problem, and one that's not shared with iPodder that I am aware of. I also agree that it would be nice if the podcast RSS feeds contained only the n most recent ones podcasts (although I'd also like to see an archive feed as well, so I can catch up on the ones I missed if I'm a latecomer). What I disagree with is the idea that it's the podcatcher's responsibility to take care of disk space.

While that would be a nice feature, let's compare podcasts to any other kind of media one can access with your PC. You choose to load it up, and only you know when you're done with it. I can download a whole bunch of video or audio manually to my PC or media player and it's my problem to keep that stuff cleaned up. I don't think podcasting is really any different, except that there's a lot more of it. That makes clean up more important, but still the responsibility of the person choosing to download it. Again, having a configurable clean-up mechanism in a podcatcher would be a great feature, and maybe a wonderful selling point, but not the resposibility of the software. I ended up writing a script to clean my directories up.

When your 30 gig iPod is full of music and you are using the remaining 3 gigs to hold podcast and you are down to 100 megs the only choice you have is to start unsubscribing to feeds.

Ed [TypeKey Profile Page]:

Nimiq keeps track of your download history.

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