Podcasts you can automatically download to a PPC/phone???

[Shadowdh]

Hi there all, I am just looking for a podcast that I can set up to automatically download to my phone (although I suspect what I am after is more the rss feeder thingy that can download stuff automatically perhaps like egress or similar)... in fact if there are any websites or rss feeders that work well buy caching the pages (or articles) and podcasts to my sdhc card then please could you pass on the information. I had a quick look at the podcast thread on here but my techie savvie-ness inhibits me to some degree... I can follow instructions and the like but deciphering most of the techie talk is pretty much all greek to me... thanks in advance for any advice...

[roddy]

It's not podcasts you're looking for, as you suspect. Any podcast will have the properly formated RSS feed (if it doesn't it isn't a podcast, it's just a bit of audio sitting on the Internet) which you then need to subscribe to using some piece of software.

I use Newsbreak on my HTC Touch, and am very happy with it. Will handle both text and audio feeds, and with podcasts you can tell it to download at a certain time automatically, or when you tell it to update (I prefer to tell it when to download, as I don't want it starting up and trying to download megabytes of stuff when I'm not near a fast connection), tell it to download certain numbers of each podcast (ie you might want only the last news podcast, but the last three of a discussion show). There's a 30 day free trial.

Let us know if you install it and we'll walk you through getting it set up.

[Shadowdh]

Thanks Roddy, as always you are a star and very helpful... next time we are in London at the same time the first pint is on me...!! I will check this out...

[Shadowdh]

Ok I downloaded the program and have installed it and its just gathering the feeds I have selected now... (one of which is the Antiwave cast... woo hooo).. out of interest Roddy (and indeed to anyone who gets feeds on their phone/ppc) which casts/feeds do you subscribe to concerning 中文 or in fact any thing that might be of interest to you?

Roddy... I will play with it some more but if I have any questions I might pester you if thats ok... cheers

[roddy]

I've currently got

Antiwave

China Reel

Princess Remy

Radio Free Asia Mandarin

德国之声

锵锵三人行

All of these are discussed here.

Attaching an opml file (in a .rar). You can use that to import all the above in one go.

Podcasts.rar

[Shadowdh]

You are the man...!! Thanks for the opml list... I will give the importing a shot... was just going through the list of casts I saved from that thread... was a bit laborious and now you have saved me a bit of work (when I should be studying for a test tomorrow...) make that two beers...!!

[roddy]

No worries.

One thing to watch out for is the network it uses when downloading. With my Touch if I turn it on and then tell it to update before it's connected to wireless, it'll try to download over the mobile network - which is both slow and potentially expensive.

[Shadowdh]

ok I got it all set up ok and even added some feeds (including your opml file thanks Roddy). What I didnt expect was the size of some of the files from 德国之声中文广播! very large and I was downloading all night to get the 20 files downloaded... (well that and some others from the other sites... very pleased with Newsbreak so far, thanks for the advice Roddy.

[roddy]

You'll want to change the settings so it doesn't download so many - start it up, click on the 德国的生 channel, menu > channel properties > podcast > then set the 'always keep this many podcasts' value.

[Shadowdh]

Found that one thanks Roddy... although at the moment I want to download as many as I can... I have a 16 gb sdhc card so have some room at the moment... loving this piece of software so far... woot...

[Shadowdh]

hi there all. does anyone know of an RSS reader that will download text and podcasts, save them and then synch with my pda phone? cheers for any help.

[roddy]

What was wrong with Newsbreak?

Nowadays you really don't want to be downloading to your home computer and then syncing across to your phone - as long as you've got wireless access at home it's much easier to use that directly. If you want something that will keep track of what you have and haven't read then a web-based RSS application is handy - I use Google's Reader, which has a nice mobile version. Not sure how it handles podcasts though.

I can't even see any up to date applications that do this. The trend is towards devices being independent of 'proper' computers, not reliant on them.

[Shadowdh]

Newsbreak is great but as I use my laptop sooooo much these days was thinking to synch the two would be nice... thanks for the input.

[roddy]

Look at Newsgator - they have a whole suite of RSS / Podcast apps, might have something that fits the bill.

Will merge the two topics.

[Shadowdh]

Will do that thanks Roddy...