If, like me, you listen to a fair amount of different podcasts, you’ll probably agree that the addition of direct wi-fi and over-the-air downloads on the iPod Touch and iPhone is an amazing feature. However, you’ll probably also agree that the current iTunes interface for managing podcasts is severely lacking. To be honest, they don’t even have really have one, since you can’t actually “subscribe” to podcasts on the iPhone, and what’s more, you can’t download podcasts that aren’t listed on the iTunes store.
So if you’re looking for something to make your podcast addiction a little bit easier to handle, you might want to check out the iPhone/iPod Touch app RSSPlayer. Luckily they managed to get Apple to allow it on the App Store (which is surprising since it does duplicate some iTunes functionality), and at a cost of 99 cents, it’s definitely worth the download.
Basically RSSPlayer will give you the ability to subscribe to all your favourite podcasts (yes, even ones that aren’t in iTunes), and with the click of a single button, check for new episodes and queue them up for download. It also doesn’t have a download size limit over a 3G network (although I think Apple got rid of that in the iPhone 3.0 update).
It does store the podcasts separately from the rest of your iTunes directory, so you can’t play them through iTunes itself, but their own player is quite good. The only criticism I have is that sometimes it’s confusing to tell which episodes you currently have downloaded because by default it filters out podcasts that are partially played. Also, a word of warning: the default settings will auto-delete any podcast that has been marked as played (even if it was only partially played before you exit). You definitely want to make sure you change this in the Sync Options.
Other than that, what are you waiting for? Download RSSPlayer on iTunes now.
I tried this app because I wanted to “un-tether” myself from iTunes for my daily dose of podcasts. There is nothing more annoying than docking my iPod and going away to do something else and then return to pick it up just before going through the door and then seeing some stupid popup in iTunes that was keeping the synch from completing like an error or confirmation box. At that point I pretty much will have to unplug and miss my podcasts for that day.
The concept of the app is cool … I really think Apple should provide subscription natively in the device. I do enjoy the ability to download podcasts as it has come in handy on more than one occasions when I have been out of town, but they need to go the extra step to make it more localized. This app doesn’t really work as well as the built in stuff. It takes quite some time to find the offset in a previously played podcast and it doesn’t play well with the remote buttons on my wirelss bluetooth headset, since I think the built in player has hijacked those events … It also crashed on me several times and is very clunky.
If you listen to podcasts daily in an uninterrupted manner then it is great. But for me, I have lots of interruptions and have to stop and start on a regular basis so it is not an acceptable replacement.
Yeah there is a bit of lag as it tries to resume a podcast that was interrupted partway through. But I’ve never had it crash on me.
I guess the other thing that sucks is you can’t have it playing podcasts in the background while you do other things on your iPhone/iPod Touch.
I’m still trying to find a decent iPhone app for this. I’ve tried RSSPlayer, but it is so slow and doesn’t work well. Mediafly’s app is free and more slick, but it seems to have problems as well. Why is it so hard to find a decent simple podcast player?
for some reason i can no longer open m4v files, can’t play videos from ABC or global~~