Podcast Clients — Category

You thought this was over! No, not for a couple of days yet. Doppler is the next one in the series and boy is it something. I was a little disgruntled by it at first but after a play round it is a decent podcatcher with a difference.

The UI is so simple and basic. About the simplest in this feature. You have a search bar at the top, the list of feeds, and two buttons. That’s it! It does podcasting, what else? So to add the feed you click the Add Feed button. It is simple enough.

Now, to see what is in the podcast you double-click it in the list. It’ll then give you a list of the episodes and their descriptions. The tricky part - where can I play the podcast I downloaded? There is no notice of which ones have been downloaded, and there isn’t any Play button or anything to open the podcast. To do that, I right click the podcast and then click Open Download Folder, then open it from there. Oh, how fun.

And that is about it really. It does download them well enough, but if you want to play them you have to go through the loopholes. Version 3 is out on beta and is a lot nicer than the current offerings, but only use it if you enjoy getting bleeding edge stuff, as some elements of it are quite broken. Look out for that.

Pros: Somewhat simple interface; it downloads the podcasts fine.
Cons: Playing the podcast isn’t as simple; no icon or anything to hint a certain cast was downloaded.
Verdict: If you just want something to download the casts then get this, otherwise you might want to look somewhere else while keeping an eye on the next version.
Doppler

The next podcatcher in the series is called ziePod. This is an interesting one. It is in the “podcatcher with a media player attached” variety. And it also has four different interfaces.

Yes, four. There is:

• Deskbar mode, which is just the media player in a bar, like winshade mode in Winamp.
• Player mode, which is the media player part and the playlist in a small window.
• Column mode, which has the media player at the bottom of the window, and podcast information at the top.
• Full mode, basically like your standard RSS reader. The column mode view on the left, then on the right the podcast information (this is the screenshot).

The column mode and full mode both have a, what I think they call, “bin view.” This is where there are four tabs along the top, Home, Folders, Search and Tasks, which contains bins of information. For example, Home has a bin “Today” telling you what podcasts have updated. This is quite handy. It also has two big “Synchronize” and “Add” buttons at the top, very nice. By default though it streams the podcast episodes. This can be annoying. You can tell it to download the podcasts to your hard drive via the options though. To download a separate episode you right-click it and then choose “Download.”

Of course though it has its media player attached. At the moment I’m not liking these. I want to use my player, not the one that is included.

ziePod can also be used as a standard RSS reader. It’ll show a little icon to show you the difference. But whether you’ll use it as a standard reader or not is up to you.

The interface is a non-standard one. In my opinion, it isn’t terribly pretty. I’ve also noticed that when I exit it, I think it is actually crashing. I’m not sure, but the notification icon stays in the tray until I mouse over it, usually indicating the program behind it crashed.

It does include a searchable directory. That’s what “Search” is for. You can type what you want and it’ll search it. However, it appears to search podcast episodes so that isn’t very good and there is no simple one-click way to add the podcast itself to your list. It uses a site called Feedzie to do it all.

Pros: At a glance information; easy to add podcasts (that you have the URL to); play the podcast without downloading it first.
Cons: Why four interfaces?; Non-standard UI; built-in player; downloading not by default; podcast directory only searches episodes.
Verdict: Well, it does appear like an OK podcatcher. Sometimes the interface could be clunky though, and I think you need to warm up to it.
ziePod Download

So during this review process I’ve noticed two types of podcatchers, those with media players, and those without them. But if you look at the media players category, it is either a media player with podcatching attached, or a podcatcher with a media player attached. We review one of those two today, iTunes. Disclaimer: This feature focuses on podcasting support, and does not entail media playing features. While sometimes the verdict will be biased depending on how crap the media player, it is not the point of these reviews.

If you have an iPod, you are most likely using this program because it does everything automatically. You plug in the iPod and it works! (Much the reason why I made PSP MusicBox). iTunes is a nice media player, it does lack one or two minor features that I like, but its podcast support is probably the best.

Firstly though, we’ll look at the quirks. It’s an Apple product, so you think that it is made for those without a clue. Actually, that is false. If you have an OPML file with all your podcasts in it, you can actually import it. When you click on the Import menu option it’ll list playlists, text files and plain XML files as import targets. It does support OPML files, you just type in *.* into the File field and press enter and the Open dialog will show everything (all common Open dialogs do that by the way).

Next I first thought I couldn’t add any feeds. There was no Add Feed button anywhere to be found. So I thought the only way was through the Podcast Directory. Actually, the “Subscribe to Podcast” option is hidden in the Advanced menu. Joyous.

Right, onto the actual podcasting and I must say I like the interface. It is very clean. You have the big update button in the top right (where the context button always is). The list of podcasts is presented like a standard tree. It’ll show you the content of the feed by clicking the triangle to the left of the feed title. There is a little orange spinning circle to the left of the feed and episode titles that it is downloading. Neat. If you want to get an episode that iTunes isn’t downloading yet, then clicking the Get button to the right of the episode title. It’ll then change to a grey circle with a X in the middle to let you cancel the download. Files that are waiting to be downloaded will appear with a grey circle to the left of their names. Blue circles indicate that the file is downloaded and ready to play.

The podcast directory is probably the largest. It is integrated with the iTunes Music Store, which really is no biggy. When you find the podcast you want to listen to, you can just click the “Subscribe” button, or get the separate episodes first to see if you like it. Many podcasts homepages have a “Subscribe using iTunes” link in them. This does make it a snap to subscribe to them, as it pops open iTunes and takes you to its iTMS page.

Because it is in iTunes, you get the media player goodness as well.

Pros: Subscribing using the directory is a snap; clean interface; snap to use.
Cons: Subscribing from a URL is hidden; OPML importing is hidden too.
Verdict: If you are an iTunes user, then this is great to use. If not, and you don’t want to change, then maybe not. (As a side-note, I’ve found that iTunes tag editing so much better than the media players and the dedicated tag editors).

And we start this series off with Juice. Juice used to be known as iPodder and has been around for a while. In the spirit of podcasts, Juice is free, and not only that but open source.

So, when you start up Juice you are presented with a window with four tabs; Downloads, Subscriptions, Directory and Cleanup. Subscriptions is where you’d want to start of course. Clicking Add will of course let you add your podcast, it’ll then do a download of the feed. One of the frustrating things I noticed about Juice is that it has to download the feed everytime. Even if it downloaded it during a general sync, when you click on a feed to look at it it’ll redownload it. That is a real big no-no for RSS readers (which podcatchers effectively are).

While you are browsing the feeds, they can have either a checkbox or a play symbol. You check the checkbox to download the cast. You then have to click the Download button, which once again downloads the RSS feed then continues downloading what you were after. The play symbol will open it up in your media player, either iTunes, Windows Media Player or Winamp. iTunes of course now supports podcasts (so look out for a review on that later), but Juice does automatically create playlists for them in the program.

The Downloads tab is where you’ll probably go most often, simply because it doesn’t have to reload the feeds all the time. Also, sometimes the feeds forget which episodes it has downloaded. Here each episode has either a grey, blue or green circle next to them. Grey meaning it was cancelled, blue meaning it is downloading, and green meaning that you can play it (by clicking on it no less). I’m not sure what else to say about this tab, so moving along

The podcast directory is OK. You just click on the Directory tab and select what you want to go through. However, it only gives the podcasts title, so finding out any more information will mean a trip to Google first.

Pros: Free; Decent interface.
Cons: Has to download the feed everytime; Some interface elements are confusing.
Verdict: A good podcast program that if I don’t find any better I guess I’ll be going back to.

Download: Juice

A while back when I was looking for a good RSS reader I had a series of articles that I thought were good and not so good. Through that I recommended RSS Owl. Well, now it’s time again, time to look for a good podcast client.

I haven’t really come across one yet, but as I try each one (which I started doing last night) I’ll post my thoughts on it here. Then if you are on the hunt for a good podcast client, at least you’ll have something to look to.