In case you haven’t noticed, iTunes 4.9, with podcasting/catching features is out. I haven’t loaded it up and played with it yet, but Matt Ray says it’s the “last nail in the coffin” for other podcatchers.
Earlier this morning, you had to download it from the site, but it’s now available by running Software Update. There’s also an iPod update.
Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes.
Update: here are some screen-shots. And check out these two posts from Josh Hallett:1, 2.
James Fairbairn notes that you can subscribe directly to podcasts without them being the iTunes podcast store. Under the Advanced menu, you just click the “Subscribe to podcast” option, and then paste in the URL for the podcast’s RSS. That’s easy enough.
Tags: itunes,
podcasting,
podcatching,
apple.
My favorite is the ‘Report a Concern’ link on each podcast title page.
Indeed, the fact that they’ve centralized the podcast list a bit troubling. As a podcast listener, you can’t just take any old URL from the web and tell iTunes to start subscribing to it…at least that I’ve found yet.
I found it hidden away in the Advanced menu: Subscribe to Podcast…. You just have to give it an RSS 2.0 address.
Adam Curry says that the Apple podcast directory will, in part, be fed by the iPodder.org directory. But I guess they’re going to start enabling closed, for-pay podcasts pretty soon.
I do find it a bit weird that the podcast URLs are not shown in the “Show Description” or “Show Info” dialogs. Not very open of them now, is it?