Late Night PC

I've been listening to podcasts off and on for maybe a year now but I've only been getting them manually. That is to say that instead of having a piece of software that will catch podcasts for me I've just been going out looking for the ones I like and grabbing them. I find now that I like podcasts so much more than the radio that I'm listening to quite a bit more of them and maybe it's time to start subscribing with a newsreader that downloads those enclosures for me automatically. So I started poking around and found surprisingly little good stuff when I search for podcatching on Linux or iTunes on Linux. On a whim I thought I'd have a look at Amarok.

I was using Amarok as my main music player on my openSuse 10.2 desktop until I broke my sound once and it wouldn't play mp3s but Kaffeine would. So Kaffeine's been my player. I've always preferred Amarok for the slick user interface and convenient use of the usually unmapped Windows key for globally accessible keyboard shortcuts. Just now I started Amarok up again and all I had to do was go to Settings -> Configure Amarok... then pick Engine on the left and set the Output Plugin field to Alsa. Okay, not obvious to a new user but I've been down this road before. Now Amarok plays fine again.

So then I look in the Playlists tab of Amarok and see that there's a Podcasts folder. Right-click that folder and choose "Add Podcast..." then a box pops up to ask for the URL of the podcast. So head on over to IT Conversations and right click the little RSS icon to the right, copy the URL and paste it in to the box for Amarok. Here are a few podcast feed URLs to get started

• Doug Kay and company assemble the good stuff at IT Conversations http://feeds.gigavox.com/gigavox/channel/itconversations
• Dave Winer, one of the inventors of all this stuff that you somehow love and hate at the same time puts up some gems on Morning Coffee Notes, the feed is at http://www.morningcoffeenotes.com/rss.xml
• Then there's Scoble's new thing at Podtech.net, Amarok doesn't seem to play the mp4 files in their feed but I'll look at that some more later

Once I had a list up I clicked on one of the podcast episodes in and a "Show Extended Info" button appears at the bottom of the window. Clicking it shows the context of the podcast episode. It seems to come from the other info in the RSS feed for the podcast. The other cool thing is that when you click play for any of the episodes in the list it starts downloading but also plays as the download is streaming in.

It looks like Amarok can synchronize with a media player or removable storage device. My cheap mp3 player uses an SD card and Amarok seems to recognize it as an option to synchronize with as soon as I put the card in, so that's promising. I'm going to start using that to grab my podcasts every couple days and see how that works out.