Juice
I’m a big podcast listener, and on the Mac I’ve always used iTunes, which does the job excellently. At work however, it just never seemed to play ball. Initially things seemed OK, but as time went on it just seemed to have a really negative effect on the speed of the machine. Every time it was running in the background everything else just seemed to run sluggishly. So I switched over to using Juice and Winamp instead. And I’m not happy.
Winamp is fine for playing MP3’s, but it’s no use at all when it comes to podcasts. This is mainly because it doesn’t remember where you left off. Shows can be almost a couple of hours long sometimes, so I can find it difficult to listen to one all in one go. In iTunes that doesn’t matter though, because it always remembers where you’re up to in an episode, even if you go listen to or watch some other things in the interim. Not so with Winamp, which if I close it I’m going to have to remember where I left off.
Juice isn’t much better, the interface feels clunky, with buttons that I don’t even understand the reason for. It doesn’t easily display my list of downloads organised by show and episode and also has a habit of downloading the same show multiple times. I’ve had particular problems with Major Nelson’s 360 podcast where I end up with 4 copies of the same episode or worse, 20 or 30 older episodes all of a sudden being downloaded out of nowhere.
Is there a good Windows podcasting solution? Democracy is equally bad, with a horrible UI which feels slow and unintuitive, and my Google searches haven’t really turned up anything that’s easy enough for your mum to use (which is really the kind of software I like). Am I missing something obvious?
