Oceanside, Nevada

In the first two days since Apple introduced iTunes 4.9 with support for podcasting, podcast subscriptions reached one million. Well, duh.

I wonder what will happen to subscriptions when Apple makes the usability of iTunes and the iPod for listening and managing podcasts not suck. Let me repeat that for the various aggregators and search engines out there: Apple’s implementation of podcasting in iTunes and on the iPod sucks. No, seriously. I’m a big an Apple fan as there is. There is literally no reason to have another mp3 player on the Mac as far as I’m concerned. But when it comes to actually listening to podcasts, man. I’ve covered some of this recently, but stick with me.

I started out with iPodderX but I dropped it before version 3.0, mainly because the directory was such a mess and I was really trying to cut down on the number of apps I use to keep up on my geek life. I was using NewsFire and iPodderX and, while both are great apps, I really felt that I should have one app that handled RSS, including enclosures. That app is NetNewsWire.

When I moved to NetNewsWire the one killer feature I gave up was conversion to bookmarkable AAC format for podcasts. If you haven’t tried this yet, once you do you’ll be hooked. Bookmarkable AAC means you can listen to a podcast on your iPod, pause it in the middle and, after syncing, resume listening on your Mac right where you left off. It works in the other direction as well. It’s simple but powerful and iPodderX can do it automatically. NetNewsWire, unfortunately, cannot but I have exchanged email with the developer and I imagine we’ll see it as a feature in NNW sooner rather than later.

Once I got hooked on the sweet candy that is NetNewsWire I found this script that automates the process of conversion to AAC and has the ability to make AAC files bookmarkable. Note that I’m not really interested in AAC so much because, frankly, the conversion to AAC from mp3 doesn’t really make a difference in file size or quality. It’s all about the bookmarks.

Then came iTunes 4.9.

Excitement followed by bitter disappointment. Over the last few days a few glaring deficiencies have come out in my iTunes podcasting experience. I listen to podcasts mostly during my commute and sometimes at home so pardon me for beating the bookmarking dead horse. I used to manage my podcasts like this:

1. NetNewsWire downloads to a playlist titled “Podcasts.” NetNewsWire automatically sets the genre of podcasts to “Podcast”.
2. A smart playlist organizes all items with genre “Podcast.”
3. Every other day or so I would use the Quick Convert script to convert all those mp3 podcasts into bookmarkable AAC format.
4. Another smart playlist then picks up items with playlist “Podcast.” and type contains “AAC,” where the play count is less than 1. This is the only playlist that was actually synced with the iPod. Since this playlist only contains items with a play count of zero, all of the podcasts in this list are guaranteed fresh. iTunes 4.8 didn’t update play count until an audio file had been played in it’s entirety so podcasts would remain in the smart playlist until I had listened to the entire playlist whether on the iPod or the Mac, (because the file is in the bookmarkable AAC format, remember).
5. A third smart playlist looks for items with playlist “Podcast” where the play count is greater than zero. This simply organized all the podcasts to which I had listened so I could quickly find them and/or delete them off my hard drive by selecting the ones I was done with and hitting option-delete.

All in all, not quite as simple as iPodderX, but it did the trick. Now, when actually listening to podcasts on my iPod, I treated it basically like a radio. I would select the “Podcasts, New” playlist and just hit play. Normally I kept it on shuffle, no repeat and it would just play podcasts until it had no new podcasts to play (which never happened, as I am always behind on podcasts). Sync my iPod at the end of the day and all played podcasts would disappear (but only if I really had listened to them) and new ones would show up. Pure simplicity.

Just so it doesn’t sound like I’m totally bagging on Apple’s podcasting effort, let me say that their directory is better than any directory out there. I gave up on directories because they were poorly formatted, had bad search functionality, whatever. I just never found a good one. The fact that Apple hugely increased the exposure of podcasting to the masses doesn’t hurt either. As for the actual usability of Apple’s podcasting interface though, well. Let me deal with iTunes itself first.

1. You can convert podcasts into AAC format, but not automatically. Additionally there is no way to make them bookmarkable without a third party script like Quick Convert. You could, I suppose, use Spotlight and the Finder to locate the individual files and change the file type to .M4B yourself, but why?
2. iTunes 4.9, at least for items in the “Podcasts” source, increments the playcount of a podcast as soon as you play it, even if you listen to only 30 seconds of it. The implication of this is, that if you have iTunes set to keep only unplayed podcasts (makes sense, so you don’t have stuff you’ve listened to cluttering the place up), if you listen to half of a podcast and then sync your iPod, it’s gone, with no way to listen to the rest of it without downloading it again.
3. Using smart playlists to organize and update my podcasts is out, because smart playlists can’t apparently see anything in the “Podcasts” source and items in the “Podcasts” source don’t show up in the Library. This is very dumb.

On the iPod side:

1. You can’t shuffle podcasts. Period.
2. You can only play one podcast at a time. When you reach the end of a podcast the iPod jumps back to the main menu. Podcasts are organized by artist so you might have three podcasts from a particular artist. You might think you could at least listen to all the podcasts from a particular artist sequentially. Nope. No soup for you! Even if there are multiple podcasts listed for an artist you only get one and then it’s back to the main menu for you. This is not just highly annoying, but for a person who listens to podcasts primarily while commuting it’s seriously dangerous. Anything requiring more attention to the iPod than clicking next or back or maybe adjusting volume is simply too much attention taken away from the road. This simple deficiency has made my iPod basically worthless for listening to podcasts while I drive.

First I tried using a modified version of my procedure as detailed above. It works, but doesn’t make anything simpler for me. Actually it makes it a little more complex, since play count doesn’t work the same for podcasts and for songs, in order to tell iTunes that you’ve listened to an item in the “Podcast” you have to control click it. Scripts that increment song play count don’t work on podcasts. That means I have to tell iTunes on each individual item, yes, I listened to it, so that iTunes will get rid of it.

Next I tried Automator. I added Doug’s Automator Actions for iTunes and, while promising, it ultimately didn’t help. I don’t program or script or anything, but I can figure most things out. Automator, in conjunction with Doug’s Actions, can find sources or files, but, as far as I can tell, it can’t find files in a particular source, like the “Podcasts” source. It’s also outrageously slow on my G4 PowerBook. I can make it find and convert all the mp3 podcasts in my Library, but it studiously ignores podcasts in the “Podcasts” source. What I need is to be able to find items in the “Podcasts” source that match kind is “MPEG audio file.” I think I can make it work from there.

The real annoyance is that it has to be this way at all. This is an Apple product for Bob’s sake! It’s supposed to “just work,” and I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t, unless you want to extend the definition of “just work” to encompass “in a brain dead and useless fashion.” While it’s probably possible for me to learn enough Apple script to fix this on my own, I shouldn’t have to. I mean, I’m not looking for something crazy like, say, being able to text message a song to my Mac and have it call my cell phone and play the song back to me. I just want to be able to listen to a random, ongoing stream of podcasts that are always new that I can stop and resume on either my iPod or my PowerBook. How hard should that be?

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