Podcasting applications suck

I'm trying to get into Podcasting. There are some interesting shows that I've started to listen to on the bus ride downtown in the morning. Unfortunately, the software sucks ass. I haven't been able to get anything I've downloaded to work properly for me. I have to just go to the website and download the shows manually.

I'm very tempted to write my own. If nothing else, it'll show me exactly how difficult it really is to get a podcasting app running.

My roommate and I had the basic idea for podcasting about a year ago. Well, ok, it was mostly his idea, but I was there. I even constructively added to the idea process. But it was mostly selfish; I just wanted my television show torrents to get automatically downloaded each week. Replace television shows with MP3s of radio broadcasts and you've got podcasting.

What I'd really like to know is, why haven't the existing RSS readers out there got this feature in their product. I mean, they already do RSS, all they would have to add is support for the <enclosure> tag, and they're off to the races. Not to mention that I don't really want to have to have two applications that basically do the same fucking thing.

Edit: Of course, the same day I posted this iPodder came out with version 2.0 of their software. Needless to say, it's much better than the one I had before.

Originally posted on Friday, 2005-03-18 at 15:16:50.