Saturday, October 15, 2005

An iTunes Wish

Apple made a number of interesting announcements this week and now I'm longing for a new iMac. However, Apple didn't announce the iTunes feature I really wanted to see; I want iTunes to filter incoming podcasts into playlists and upload them that way to my iPod.

The problem I'm having is that some of the podcasts I regularly listen to are actually snippets of things from the Australian Broadcasting Corp, or the BBC or NPR. These segments are typically only 3-8 minutes long. When I'm listening to these shows on my iPod, I don't want to keep stopping every few minutes to select a new show, so I've been organizing them into playlists, such as News and Tech and Education. However, that makes for lots of management on my part and requires me to actually remember what I've listened to and what I haven't.

It seems like this feature shouldn't be too difficult to add. My NetNewsWire Lite is able to manage my podcast subscriptions, and those subscriptions can be organized into folders. I'll have to play with the preferences to see if that program is smart enough to upload them in folders to iTunes. If it isn't, I'm hoping Apple will add that feature soon. Do any of you know of a program that already does this? Any developers out there looking for a new project?