The podcast listeners guide

Playlist

by Mathew Honan, Playlist Magazine

Tired of listening to the same stations playing the same music, sawing the same old sports clichés, and repeating the most deadly dull of local news? Thanks to the world of podcasting, your daily drive doesn’t have to be a drag. Apple’s iTunes 7 has improved support for these subscription-based audio and video shows. There’s never been a better time to take the podcasting plunge.

Discovering new podcasts

When podcasts first took off, finding good ones was a trial by fire. You typically had to search through various Web site aggregators. And if you wanted to get a feel for a show, your only choice was to download it. No more. iTunes 7 makes it easy to find shows you’ll enjoy.

Browse Around To browse iTunes’ podcast offerings, click on the iTunes Store link in the left column of the iTunes window. Once the Store loads, select the Podcasts link in the upper left corner. Along the left of the page that appears, podcasts are sorted into genres such as Health, News & Politics, Sports & Recreation, and Technology. The main window highlights some of the newest feeds, staff favorites, and a regularly changing mix of featured podcasts. Look to the right and you’ll see a list of the top 30 podcasts. Click on the Top Podcasts link to widen your view to the top 100.

Once you find something that looks interesting, click on its title to see a description. User ratings and reviews can help you decide if the show is worth subscribing to. If you’re still on the fence, try a sample episode. Pick a title from the Name list at the bottom of the store window, and click on the Get Episode button to download it. You can also double-click on the episode name to play it without actually downloading the file. If you like what you hear (or see), click on the Subscribe button at the top of the window. iTunes will automatically retrieve new episodes for you.

Search for Specifics Got a specific podcast in mind? Use the store’s search feature to find it fast. Let’s say you’re looking for Lost podcasts. Type the word

Lost

into the Search iTunes Store box. When the Search Results page appears, click on the Podcasts link at the top of the window. This weeds out other results—for instance, songs from the soundtrack or episodes of the TV show itself.

Managing your podcasts

The latest version of iTunes features several new options for managing subscriptions. Here are some of the most useful.

Access Your Preferences You’ve always been able to access your podcast preferences by going to iTunes: Preferences and clicking on Podcasts. But now there’s a faster way. When you’re browsing your subscriptions (select Podcasts in the list to the left of your iTunes window to see them), just click on the Settings button at the bottom of the window to go to your podcast preferences.

Control Your Downloads One of my favorite new management features in iTunes is the dedicated downloads window. Control your downloads by clicking on Downloads in the list to the left (this link shows up only when there are downloads in progress). In the window that appears, you can pause the download by pressing the tiny pause button to the right of the podcast’s status bar.

This can be especially useful if you have a slow Internet connection, or if you need to dedicate bandwidth temporarily to some other task. When you’re ready to resume downloading, click on the small refresh button.

Making the iPod connection

Although you can listen to or view podcasts on your Mac, there’s a good reason this technology isn’t called iTunescasting. Ultimately podcasts are designed for portability.

Sync It Up To select which podcasts transfer to your iPod, first connect the player. Select your iPod in the list to the left of the iTunes window and click on the Podcasts tab. Begin by defining which podcasts you want to sync with your iPod. You can select all or just a few. You can also define how many episodes to transfer. For instance, you can choose to sync all of them, only the most recent episodes (such as the last five or ten), all unplayed episodes, or just the most recent unplayed episodes. For example, to avoid overloading my iPod with older episodes or ones I’ve already listened to in iTunes, I sync only the three most recent unplayed episodes.

Once you’ve tweaked the settings, the selected podcasts show up on your iPod after syncing (provided you have configured your iPod to sync automatically). Syncing works very much as it does with a regular playlist. New episodes automatically appear while older ones are tossed in the electronic dustbin. On the player, the Podcasts menu appears under Music.

Organize Your Episodes Want to impose more order on your podcasts? Use a playlist instead. Say you want to listen to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me before you watch ABC World News without having to navigate manually between the two. To play podcasts in a certain order, simply drag the episodes you want to hear to a new playlist (File: New Playlist) and arrange them the way you want.

Set the playlist to sync automatically with your iPod. (Click on the iPod’s name in the list to the left of the iTunes window, click on the Music tab, and then select the playlist’s name in the Selected Playlist list.) Or, if you have your iPod set up for manual file transfers, you can just drag and drop the playlist’s icon onto the iPod’s icon in iTunes.

Going beyond iTunes

Once you become a podcast junkie, you may discover that iTunes can’t meet all your needs. Newsreaders were the original podcast-management applications. These tools let you subscribe to and read autogenerated feeds from news sites, blogs, and other Web publications. They are especially useful if you subscribe to a lot of podcast feeds and want the freedom to download episodes selectively rather than have iTunes grab every one.

NewsGator’s $30 NetNewsWire 2.1.1 and Kula’s $18 Endo 1.0 ( ) both offer excellent podcast support. They let you choose whether to import podcasts automatically into iTunes and allow you to drop podcasts into specific playlists and change the genre settings.

But if there’s one thing that will truly enhance your podcasting experience, it’s Odeo. This free, Web-based podcast manager lets you find and subscribe to podcasts, and then it delivers new episodes straight to a personal online inbox. And because Odeo is Web-based, you can listen to podcasts from any computer without keeping redundant subscriptions at work and home. You can even import your Odeo subscriptions into iTunes by clicking on the Subscribe To Your Inbox In iTunes link at the bottom of your inbox page.

Odeo also includes great social-networking features, so you can link up with friends and check out their favorite subscriptions—a useful way to find new content. But perhaps its most interesting feature is the browser-based recording studio, which lets you record and publish your own podcasts, taking you from mere listener to broadcaster.

Tip

If you want to subscribe to a podcast that iTunes doesn’t list, go to Advanced: Subscribe To Podcast and type in the URL of the show’s feed. Click on OK, and iTunes will add it to your list of subscriptions.

[ Mathew Honan writes about technology for the National Journal Technology Daily and Wired. Go check out his Mac-oriented Weblog. ]

(DISCLAIMER: Mac Publishing, publisher of Macworld and Playlist, recently entered into a business relationship with NewsGator, publisher of NetNewsWire, that will include providing services on Macworld.com and selling a news reader application based on NetNewsWire.)

Smart Searches: By clicking on the Podcasts tab in iTunes 7’s search results, you can filter out TV shows, movies, and music.

"The podcast listeners guide" Comments