Apple’s iTunes Is The Best Podcatcher – Change My Mind

With podcasts, I go through phases. There have been years when I haven’t listened to a single one, and others where I listen to them almost religiously. Lately, after a bit of a time without any podcasts in my life, I decided to start listening to some again – partially fueled by the fact that I am finding myself on airplanes a lot more lately, with lots of time to listen to other people talk.

Nonetheless, downloading individual releases from each podcast website got old really quick, so I sucked it up and decided to search for a good podcast downloader – aka: “podcatcher”. It didn’t take long before I realized that the podcatch software game is a bit lacking nowadays. So bad, in fact, that I’ve been naively mulling taking up coding to create my own.

After spending some time in Google, I stumbled on a handful of possible solutions, but none of them worked out. VLC supports podcasts, and quite well, but it doesn’t support automatic downloading – which I want, since I never know where I’ll be when I want to listen or grab the file to take it on the go. A friend recommended Plex, but that’s a non-option as well for my purposes.

In truth, I am having a hard time even recollecting all of the podcatchers I’ve tested up to this point, which makes this search so crazy to me. Why are podcatchers so rare? Desperate, I even downloaded a deprecated application called Miro, which, as it runs on Java, is prone to being finicky. At the moment, the application is broken for me, after having worked just fine for a couple of weeks. It will still download podcasts, but the list view is completely broken, disallowing me to select an episode to listen to.

I also tried a dedicated app called Juice, which also appears deprecated, and also one in the Windows Store called PodIt. Without fail, there’s an issue with a podcatcher even if it manages to download it fine. PodIt renames the file to some nonsensical alphanumeric value, making it complicated to tell which episode is the one you actually want. Juice seemed almost perfect – except that it couldn’t accept three of the feeds I gave it.

File names after iTunes downloads podcasts

Fast-forward to an iTunes recommendation from a friend. I scoffed at the idea at first, remembering just how bloated and finicky the application was back in the day. But desperate enough, I decided to install it. I can honestly say, I am glad I did, because it just so happens that iTunes is the best podcatcher I’ve found.

Here’s what iTunes does well: It accepts any feed I throw at it, and it downloads each episode without hassle. I can also adjust each and every feed on a per-feed basis, in case I want my more favorite podcasts to retain their episodes longer, in case I can’t get to them right away. It also happens to name them in a completely human-readable format, in MP3, allowing you to transport the files as necessary. The files are not downloaded in the same way actual music files are, destined to be synced with an Apple device.

Ultimately, I am extremely impressed with iTunes as a podcatcher. It’s even pretty lightweight overall, with Windows currently dedicating about 400MB of memory across the main application and its subservices (eg: iPod Service, iTunesHelper). The absolutely only beef I have with it at this point is that doesn’t seem to be possible to have it start at boot minimized to the system tray – but that’s a small caveat I can personally deal with.