iTunes half-asses podcasts

June 28th, 2005

The much talked-about podcast version of iTunes has landed. The interface is rather slick. A big catalog of available podcasts has been added to the iTunes Music Store, all for free so far. There is single screen for viewing your list of podcasts and the available episodes.

The whole thing looks really cool until you try to import from your current podcast app… Apple has provided to support for importing or exporting OPML files, and thus sucking in data from iPodder and other tools. While I don’t subscribe to that many podcasts, it was still a pain to manually copy/paste each feed. Then I discovered that many podcasts were broken, even some listed in the iTunes catalog. It looks like these are all feeds that are distributed as torrents, which appareanly iTunes can’t handle. Nice.


Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

 

2 Responses to “iTunes half-asses podcasts”

  1. riotgeek says:
    6/29/2005 at 10:22 pm

    And with the usual apple style, “It looks cool, but the functionality is a different story”… sorry just burnt out after my work iMac had to be sent in for the 2nd time. But it does make me think of SGI, not much really mind blowing about em, but damn they sure look cool!

  2. dangerboy says:
    6/30/2005 at 9:48 am

    I’d be OK if it just allowed OPML import/export. The BitTorrent thing isn’t such a big deal since so many sites are blocking torrent traffic anyway, but they are stupid to include feeds that their app can’t download.

    Oh, and distributing podcasts as torrents isn’t the brightest idea. I understand the goal of saving bandwidth, but most companies block the traffic because it’s also used so much for illegal file trading. So people are limited to download those podcasts at home.