I Dream in Colors

03/06/07 Podcasts on iTunes

Being Apple a company that pays so much attention to user interface, it sometimes amazes me how poor is the iPod/iTunes suite at podcast management. iTunes can only mark a podcast listened or unlistened. With this, you can tell iTunes to sync all your podcasts or only the unlistened ones, and to keep all the shows, the last X shows, all the unlistened shows(*), or the last X unlistened shows.

But half of the shows on my to-listen list (wich right now is up to 50) are half an hour or more. Most of these shows I often pause and resume listening later. With the options iTunes gives me, I have to choose between keeping every single show or loosing the half played ones when I sync the iPod (the “last X shows” options are useless to me, since you have to apply the same selection to all your subscriptions).

The abbility to mark a podcast as unplayed from the iPod would be very helpful. But what would really solve much of these problems is a very simple thing. A “half played” status. If you often pause shows and resume them later, you could set iTunes to “sync all unplayed and half-played shows”, this way you’d keep those podcasts you want to finish listening even after you sync the iPod. And if you want your podcasts deleted even if you only half-listened to them, you could tell iTunes to only sync the fully unplayed shows.

This is not difficult to implement. How does one have to do to make a suggestion to the Apple people? Is anyone interested in starting a site with new feature requests for iTunes/iPod? I know I’m not the only one wishing for extremely reasonable iTunes features. Maybe this way we’d be getting useful upgrades, and not just full-screen coverflow…

(*): well, in theory. In reality, iTunes keeps old podcasts even when set to “delete all played” and “allow auto delete”. Drives me nuts! Anyone knows what may be the problem?

Technorati Tags: iTunes, iTunes improve, iPod, podcast, Apple

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