Podcasts: News & Such

I've been in the habit of listening to public radio (usually KQED or KALW) while commuting for years, but some of my favorite shows aren't on when I'm commuting. So, for that, podcasts are perfect.



I tend to go in every month or two and delete whatever I haven't been listening to, and search for new things. Right now I especially like the shorter podcasts, less than fifteen minutes in length. For road trips and such, though, I'll pick and choose individual longer things.

Music

I get music from many sources: ripping my own CDs, free tracks from artist or label web sites, even occasional piracy to decide if I want to buy something. At the moment my iTunes library is 34.63 GB (which I know is tiny compared to friends who've ripped their entire CD collections, but I haven't been that bored yet.) Since my iPod only holds 8 GB, I've got a couple of smart playlists set up to feed it.



The first, "Recently Added," contains the most recent 5 GB of songs (not including podcasts or speech, only after I switched to my current Mac, and nothing really long.) The second is called "Unplayed," and is an attempt to catch up on songs I haven't heard in a year (but also haven't skipped in the past month, and wasn't added in the past month, has to be shorter than 15 minutes, not a podcast, not the short recordings from the Dalai Lama, and not trance.) As each song in the latter playlist is played, it suddenly doesn't qualify for the playlist anymore — so iTunes replaces it with the next. Very cool.

Podcasts: Music

But then I've been struggling with music podcasts. A lot of the music podcasts I'd like to listen to are "song of the day" — or of the week, or similar — which doesn't match the settings I have for news podcasts. I don't want these songs to be deleted, ever, unless I choose to delete them — and I don't want them to be excluded from the smart playlists, but I still want the news podcasts to be excluded, so...these are things iTunes cannot do.

After searching around for a simple command-line RSS mp3 sucker (why are they only written in PHP?), I decided to give Juice (formerly iPodder) a try. It's ugly and clunky, but seems to work — and the iTunes integration is sufficient, though not as flexible as I'd've preferred.



Juice will check every day for new articles in a few of the feeds I've been wanting to try. These get cached in Juice's own directory, and also loaded in iTunes — with playlists named after each feed. Since they aren't considered to be podcasts by iTunes, my Recently Added smart playlist gets 'em too — and thus, so does the iPod.

I'll try this for a while and see if it works for me, though I'd still prefer to have something run out of cron in the background.

Discovering New Artists

The main reason I did the whole Juice thing is that (as I've mentioned before) I've been enjoying salon.com's daily free downloads on AudioFile — worth the yearly subscription all by itself. Salon has become the primary place I find new music these days, such as Lavender Diamond (whom I'm going to see in a few weeks.) I'm looking forward to discovering more good stuff through these other podcasts.

Which feeds do you like to listen to? Which artists have you discovered? My ears are hungry!