Even though I'm a big fan of podcasts, I'm yet to find an application that make things easy all the time... annoyingly, apparently there are many applications that have a few of the features I'd like to have, but none has all of them...
Opera web browser reads correctly some sort of "header" of the podcast, shows a lightweight, text only description of the episode (when available) and presents the links for download;
but there's no neat organization in folders like there's in Akregator, Firefox-sage, thunderbird, and perhaps some others.
All these others lack this thing I mentioned in opera (except Thunderbird, even though it presents the link as a pseudo attachment, which is weird, but acceptable), instead they show some webpage related to the podcast, but which will not necessarily have the link to the download itself (such as NPR's podcasts; instead of a link to the mp3, the page shown has a link for those online flash players).
The closest thing seems to be thunderbird, but to me it seems that a huge ammount of podcast subscriptions (plus a lot of email) make the whole thing quite slow. Not to mention that it's somewhat annoying to add some new subscription.
Amarok is almost fine, but for some reason I can't make the "configure podcasts" dialog appear, I think I'll have to look for something configuration file and edit it manually to save the files where I want... If only it reproduced the "tree" from the podcast list as real folders and could play in faster tempos, it would be very close to perfection
...and kmail apparently does not support rss feeds...
...Kitty apparenty not only have similar failures of the the other ones except Opera and Amarok, but is unable to import a opml list.
There are a few programs listed in the debian lenny repositories, "planet" is one of them; but if I got it right, it will have probably a problem similar to the one that Opera has... not only there will be no "neat" selection of folders, but all the listings will be merged in only one thing...
but I got to check it right.... there's another program, I don't recall it's name...
Anyone is happy with some particular feed/podcast client not listed here?
Edited: Well, I think I've found a
very satisfactory solution with
Google Reader . But I'll let the topic open because it seems to be an interesting subject.
Google reader combines the neat organization of folders (well, not as easy as actually arranging folders on something like konqueror or most file managers, but still far better than opera's feed reader pseudo-folders), with the option of downloading the source or listening in an embeded player provided by google itself, sharing your favorite episodes with friends (I don't know how it works yet), with the advantage of being acessible anywhere, as it's web-based, which also makes the local storage almost negligible, just like normal browsing cache. I find hard to imagine something better.
Linear Mode
