Programming

In the last post, I covered how to use Perl to get podcasts downloaded with Juice to show up in the "Podcasts" section of iTunes.

The only real problem with that alone is that you still have to manually delete old podcasts from your podcasts directory (either directly, or using Juice's "Cleanup" tab). That's a pain in the ass. What follows is a nice little windows script that you can run to automatically delete podcast files that you have listened to and deleted in iTunes.
Continue reading "Using iTunes with Juice Receiver (Part II)"

For various (bug-related) reasons, I strongly dislike the podcast feature in iTunes. Mainly because, at random, it will mysteriously delete episodes of podcasts (giving "could not be found" errors when trying to play or sync them to my iPod).

I tried a number of different alternatives (YamiPod, Floola, myPodder), but all had their limitations and bugs of their own. After trying a few different podcatchers, I decided that Juice is my favorite. For a while, I used a combination of Juice, RockBox (open source alternative firmware for the iPod that allows you to just copy your music directly to the player without iTunes), and SyncToy to keep my music and podcasts up to date, but this was lacking as well. While I don't like the podcast features of iTunes, I do like the clean look and feel of the iPod interface, and the way podcast episodes are auto-bookmarked and marked as new or listened automatically—something that RockBox simply can't compete with.

Now, Juice does support iTunes, but it doesn't put your podcasts into the "Podcasts" section—it just copies them over as regular songs and creates playlists for each show to keep track of the episodes. This is lame. What follows is my hacked solution that lets Juice put your podcasts where they belong in your iTunes library.
Continue reading "Using iTunes with Juice Receiver"