As a heavy
podcast listener since the early days of Keith and the Girl, Dawn and Drew,
Daily Source Code, Bibb and Yaz, The Bitterest Pill, The Twisted Pickle Show, Nate
and Di, and countless others that have come and gone, come back again, and gone
again, having someone yap in my ear during my workday has become a mainstay of
my existence. In fact, on rare occasion
when my mp3 player isn’t with me in my cubicle, I feel almost like I’m wearing
my underwear on the outside of my pants…something just isn’t right.
Until I
purchased my iTouch in Jan. of ’08 I had never been a slave to iTunes. I had always used Juice as my podcatcher and
websites like www.PodcastPickle.com
and www.PodcastAlley.com to find new
content and get RSS subscription information about shows I was interested
in. Then, in the world of drag-n-drop
Windows XP, I was simply able to connect my mp3 player to the computer via USB and
transfer whatever new .mp3 files rested in my ‘podcast downloads’ directory
right onto my player, leaving for hours of entertainment while slaving away in
the corporate world. There’s nothing
quite like working on some serious report while listening to Keith and Chemda
of www.keithandthegirl.com discuss
painting the faces of disgusting, booger covered, flakey skinned children.
Honestly,
my entire life might be different now if any one of the 4 display Zune devices
at my local Best Buy had actually worked.
On that cold January day I went to the Best Buy after hours of research
on the internet, reading forums posts, comparisons, and toiling, I had decided
on a Zune primarily for its ability to connect to your home network and sync
podcasts automatically. When none of the
display models worked, either frozen on a screen, unresponsive to my thumb
trying to navigate around, or the other two that just plain wouldn’t fire up, I
turned 180 degrees, saw a beautiful iTouch box with a picture of John Lennon on
it, and plopped out my saved up Christmas money with eager anticipation. When I got home with the new device, I did
one of the geekiest things I had ever done up to that point…I created an
unboxing video and stuck it up on www.YouTube.com for the entire world to see. Shortly after is when I became a slave to
iTunes.
As any iPod
owner knows, if you’ve got one of these you must have iTunes. Yes there are work-arounds and hacks all over
the interwebs about bypassing this memory hog of a program but the hassle is
hardly worth it. The XP machine I had
installed iTunes on has, over the last year, become exclusively an iTunes podcatching
machine. This is its only job. Sit in the corner of the bedroom, iTunes
open, and download new podcasts. Wait
for me to plug in the iTouch, send it the new podcasts while marking listened
to ones for removal, and repeat….over and over, day in, day out. Why waste all of that processing power to do
one simple task that Juice used to do for me with a much smaller footprint and
memory requirement? Because it’s just
easier not to do anything else on that PC.
It is a little old, slow, sometimes unresponsive, and there’s nothing
worse than waking up in the morning, heading to work with a hopefully full of
new podcasts iTouch, and realizing upon firing it up after sitting down at my
cube for a hard day’s worth of work that there are no new podcasts because god
forbid I left Firefox and iTunes open over night, iTunes crashed, and I have
nothing new to listen to all day long.
Well this
problem appears to have disappeared for me with the newest firmware upgrade of
the iPhone / iTouch. Firmware release
2.2 now supports direct podcast downloads!
As a prime example of what was just described, yesterday was
Thanksgiving. Some of the daily shows I
listen to probably didn’t put out a show yesterday, but I know there were
episodes from Wednesday that were not on my iTouch this morning. So wishing to try out the new direct download
feature, clicked the new ‘Get more episodes’ option under the Keith and the
Girl podcasts heading and was taken to iTunes.
Granted, it would have been much more convenient if iTunes had known I
was coming from the Keith and the Girl RSS feed and taken me directly to their
download page instead of taking me to a generic catch-all iTunes podcast page,
but after a quick KATG search, I was able to download two shows that my
podcatching iTunes machine at home had for some yet unknown reason, not put on
my iTouch before I left for work this morning.
Even the animation when you click the ‘download’ button for each episode
was cool. It sort of shrink-bounce-drops
right into the Downloads tab with grace, beauty, and anticipated
excitement. It’s almost as though the
file is grateful to be sent t the Downloads tab.
Now I had
heard speculation and rumors about the iTunes over-the-air downloads being
limited to shows with file sizes of 10mb or less. This very well may be true for the iPhone
folks going over AT&T’s network, but I am very happy to say that I was able
to download two 80MB Keith and the Girl episodes via my work’s Wi-Fi network
within minutes of requesting the files and they now happily reside right where
they should, the podcasts tab under the Music button right in the Keith and the
Girl directory.
Again, it
would be quite nice if I was in Music > Podcasts > The Bitterest Pill’s
episode list, clicked the ‘Get More Episodes’ option and I landed on The
Bitterest Pill’s RSS feed inside iTunes without having to search for the show
by title, but perhaps that’ll be something the fine folks in Cupertino fix in
the next firmware release. For now, I am
quite happy to be able to download any podcast out of thin air without having
to physically connect my iTouch to the dying beast of a machine that has been
wasting away in the corner of my bedroom as the iTunes slave. Maybe now I can bring new life into that
machine with a lovely Linux distro.