Reports from the Asylum

I’m one of those pigheaded holdouts who doesn’t own an iPod. That means that iTunes, in addition to being a pain in the anatomy, is useless for syncing up my Sansa Clip with my computer. That’s why I never use it unless a client project requires it for something.

If I had the Sansa in MTP mode, it would talk to Windows Media Player, but Windows Media Player is not a podcatcher. And past the point of some update or another to Windows XP, my computer no longer recognized the Sansa in MTP mode, and I had to switch it over to MSC mode anyway. That means that my computer looks at the media player as if it were any other external drive, so the way to get new podcasts onto it was to drag and drop them through Windows Explorer.

Now, I never really minded doing that; it’s not as though it’s difficult, and it doesn’t take very long. Automatic synchronization still seemed like a nice idea, but it didn’t seem as though anyone was going to bother offering the service without tying you to a particular product like the iPod or Zune.

And podcatcher development seemed to have pretty much dried up once iTunes became dominant. Nevertheless, I was in the market for a new one. I’d started using Ziepod rather than Juice once I became a two-computer family on a regular basis, because of the option to selectively download podcasts. But for the last month or so Ziepod has crashed almost every time I’ve started it, requiring  a restart, and development seems dead in the water. (Another one of those Windows updates?)

Then I read the Lifehacker post on the Five Best Podcast Managers. The top score went to gPodder, a tool I’d thought was only for Linux.

After reading the review, I hopped over and downloaded it, then unzipped it and tried it. (gPodder is one of those self-contained tools that runs right out of the folder it comes in; you don’t need to install it.) I then imported an OPML file (interestingly, it couldn’t read the one that Ziepod produced, but I had an older one sitting around), updated a few podcasts, and checked it out.

gPodder displays podcast album art, which neither Juice nor Ziepod does—a nice touch. You can mark episodes as old so that it won’t download them. It tells you how many downloaded episodes are waiting to be played.

And you can sync it. Once you tell it where to find your MP3 player and set a few more parameters, just select Device | Sync episodes to device (or press CTRL+S), and you’re off. I get a mysterious error message at the end of my sync process, but it still works.

I’m delighted. I don’t know that this will save me enough time to notice, but I’m still glad to be able to sync my podcasts automatically.

Now, if anyone is actually reading this, someone may write in and tell me that there’s something else out there that does this. In which case, I’m all ears, and I’ll be happy to test it and write about it.