Tag Archives: itunes

iTunes’s podcast feature is lame

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I don’t know if other podcasting programs allow you to play more than one song from your podcast stream at once, but iTunes doesn’t. You can’t just leave your podcasts running. You have to click each one individually to play it. This is silly, because I’m not going to sit around and keeping clicking every time I want to hear another song. I could just add the entire podcast to my library, but how do I know that I want to do that until I’ve heard the songs in the podcast? Bad UI! Bad!

What software would you suggest for receiving podcasts? Obviously I’m most interested in open source software available for Mac OS X, but let’s hear what you’ve got.

Why I can’t upgrade to Tiger

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I’ve been meaning to upgrade my Mac to OS X v10.4, a.k.a. Tiger, for a while now. The DVD is sitting by my computer. I have updated all of my applications so that they will operate on Tiger after the upgrade. However, there is still one thing missing… Ogg support in iTunes.

My music collection currently consists of a mixture of mp3s and Ogg Vorbis files, with a few FLAC files thrown in for good measure (I used to be a free software absolutist, and I attempted to convert my entire music collection to open formats). ITunes does not natively support Ogg files, but there is a Quicktime plugin which allows me to play Oggs in iTunes, burn them to CDs, basically anything that I can do with an mp3 file. Unfortunately, the plugin stopped working with the release of Quicktime 7.0, iTunes 4.8, and OS X 10.4 (and the project appears to be abandoned, so I don’t anticipate an update). Therefore I have not upgraded any of that software, so that I can continue to play Oggs and use them to burn CDs.

This is the last thing holding me back from upgrading to Tiger (and the new Quicktime and iTunes). I need something which will play mp3s and Oggs, and burn CDs with both mp3s and Oggs. Any ideas? (Damn you Apple, for not building in Ogg support.)