MediaMonkey forum

I've tried all the podcatchers that I can find:

* iTunes
* Doppler
* Juice (formerly iPodder)
* RSSRadio
* Replay A/V

and am not very impressed with any of them. iTunes just takes over your pc like cancer and moves like a pre-climate-change glacier. The maker of Doppler is too busy working his day job to devote the time to updating it. Juice (iPodder) is dying on the vine. RSSRadio has some good features and very quick support, but the interface looks like it was designed by Britney Spears. Replay A/V is pretty capable, but the price is ridiculous ($50.00) if you only want to use it as a podcatcher (it does much more, but you might not care).

My biggest pet peeve is the fact that many of the podcasters of the podcasts I use choose to supply lousy ID3 tags with their podcasts -- or at least which appear meaningless once truncated to 31 characters and synced to an iPod.

Only RSSRadio and Replay A/V are even supposed to have the ability to automatically re-tag the podcasts they download (example retagging a podcast titled "Fresh Air With Terry Gross for Friday, February 23, 2007" to something more useful like "%YY.%MM.%DD Fresh Air" (2007.02.23 Fresh Air). However RSS Radio requires that you use either iTunes (evil) or Windows Media Player (sucky) to do retagging, which seems like a kludge. As it turns out, Replay A/V only retags stream recordings (it does that, on a schedule, in addition to downloading podcasts), but not podcasts. The makers of Replay A/V said last week that they just realized this and will add podcast automatic re-tagging on the next release, but for now at least, it doesn't work.

If anyone is aware of better podcatcher, please describe it.

Well MM3 will have podcast functionality, so maybe this will save the day for you!

I realize that the feature set of MM3 is not set yet, but do you have an idea whether it will include the ability to do automatic retagging?

A good start would be able to setup any given podcast to automatically rewrite the title, artist and album title fields using wildcards like these:

%a - Abbreviated weekday name.
%A - Full weekday name.
%b - Abbreviated month name.
%B - Full month name.
%c - Date and time representation appropriate for locale.
%d - Day of month as decimal number (01 – 31).
%H - Hour in 24-hour format (00 – 23).
%I - Hour in 12-hour format (01 – 12).
%j - Day of year as decimal number (001 – 366).
%m - Month as decimal number (01 – 12).
%M - Minute as decimal number (00 – 59).
%p - Current locale’s A.M./P.M. indicator for 12-hour clock.
%S - Second as decimal number (00 – 59).
%U - Week of year as decimal number, with Sunday as first day of week (00 – 53).
%w - Weekday as decimal number (0 – 6; Sunday is 0).
%W - Week of year as decimal number, with Monday as first day of week (00 – 53).
%x - Date representation for current locale.
%X - Time representation for current locale.
%y - Year without century, as decimal number (00 – 99).
%Y - Year with century, as decimal number.
%z - Time-zone name or abbreviation; no characters if time zone is unknown.
%1 - original title (for relocating to a different field, such as comments).
%2 - original artist
%3 - original album

I've moved this into the wishlist section for you!

SoonerLater wrote:I realize that the feature set of MM3 is not set yet, but do you have an idea whether it will include the ability to do automatic retagging?

These would be wonderful, but I'd settle for simple podcatching, myself. Preferably with the ability to tell which podcasts have been recently updated. The kludge of downloading through iTunes and then having MM rescan my hard drive so I can then re-order all of the updated podcasts to find the episodes that I want to transfer to my ZEN is just not working for me.

I've had the same problem - trying to find a padcast catcher that doesn't annoy me.

I've also tried the ones listed in this thread and have actually found one that I like (or can tolerate) more than the others.

It's called HappyFish http://happyfish.info

It's a little quirky but it does give quite a bit of control over tags and filenames. It's also free (charity-ware - they suggest charities to boost your karma on the website) and has had a few updates in recent months.

Other than some minor odd issues with the program, it's the first I think I'm happy with.