I’m a podcast fanatic. I listen to several (mostly tech) podcasts each week. Since I find myself in the car way more than I want, at least a podcast makes the time seem more productive and interesting.
I’ve tried several different tools and/or combination of tools to automatically download and sync my podcasts to my mp3 player (Sansa Fuse). RSSRadio was my tool of choice for quite a while. It would download the podcasts and save them to the computer and then I would use Windows Media Player to sync them to my mp3 player. This was not the best setup. While RSSRadio did a wonderful job, I would have to manage my podcasts more than I wanted to. I would have to figure out which ones I had listened to and delete them so there would be room for the new ones.
Enter in Mediafly. Mediaflyis an web 2.0 app. It is a combination of podcast directory, podcast manager, and podcast catcher/syncer. I love it. I choose several podcasts (about 10 or 12), subscribed to the feeds and then let Mediafly‘s sync software take care of the rest. There are other options for downloading and syncing, but Mediafly‘s sync software, in my opinion, is by far the coolest. After setting it up I didn’t have to think about my podcasts. I hook up my fuse to the computer and Mediafly deletes the old podcasts and adds the new ones. No more thinking!
There are plenty of options for each podcast (feed). I can choose to keep the podcast for a specific amount of time (days, weeks, months,), or keep it until I delete it. The advantage is if you have daily podcasts you download, but you might not listen to everyday. So, you tell Mediafly you only want to keep them for a certain number of days. If you don’t listen to them, then they automatically disappear.
You can also say you want a certain number of a certain podcast. So, some podcasts I might only want one episode whether I listen or not, for others I might want to allow more because I will want to ‘catch up’ listening to them when I have time. Mediafly allows this and even other options.
These are just a few reasons why I love Mediafly. I believe they are adding more features and I know I’ve missed some. One down side is with how the Fuse does things. The Fuse only uses bookmarks on podcasts and audiobooks. In order for the Fuse to know that a file is a podcast and/or audiobook is that it is placed in the correct directory, or tagged in the mp3 info tag. Mediafly doesn’t have the functionality yet. I emailed them and within an hour I received a response telling me they were aware of the issue and working on it for a future version of the sync software.
If you love podcasts, but don’t want to have to think about the whole sync process, check out Mediafly!
or is it, feed my reads. Anyway, Pluck doesn’t seem too bad. The downside is it only works with IE and I use Firefox. The nice thing is there is a web interface that may come in handy. My point in this rambling is simply to say there is a conversation going on via blogs. Some of the stuff is fluff and I’m not sure it is worth the time to read all of it. However, there are some very important things being said. So, if you know of a great RSS reader, let me know.