This is the RAW file for the answers of the March 2008 gPodder survey ===================================================================== https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/gpodder-devel/2008-March/001622.html How often do you check for new episodes? Manual or automatically? *) twice a week, manual feed update, then download desired new episodes manually (i.e. I do not use the 'these episodes are available for download' window) *) once/week manually *) Twice a week I open up gpodder and manually select update feeds. *) use everyday; check automatically every 20 minutes *) Once a week. *) I check about twice every day, manually. I download episodes I want, then mark unwanted episodes as "deleted" so they won't pop up during the next update. *) I start it once a day and it grabs new things automatically then. I intend to set it as a cron job using --run in the near future. *) every day *) Automatically - set to 90 minutes, but I don't always keep it running. *) I start gPodder about twice a week, manual feed update, then download desired new episodes manually (i.e. I do not use the 'these episodes are available for download' window) *) gPodder starts automatically and check for new episodes every time the computer starts, normally 4 times a week. I'm using the 'these episodes are available for download' window, normally just clicks OK. *) I'm using the automatic check. *) Every day after the login, I start gpodder and check manually. *) Automatically, I am set for 60min interval, I have gpodder running as a tray icon at all times. *) Automatically every 30 minutes. *) Manually once every day or every 2 days. I use gpodder --run at the command line. To how many channels are you currently subscribed to? *) 12 *) ~47 *) 21 *) 18 (video). That's only my video podcasts. *) 4 *) 23, all audio. *) about 45. Mostly audio, but there are a couple video, and a couple that feed both (most often the Real Time with Bill Maher one). *) 12 (audio only) *) 20 audio *) 4 Audio and 1 Video channel *) 16 *) ~10 *) 21 8 are audio the rest are video *) 16 channels. *) 18 Do you leave your episodes in gPodder or export them using "save as"? *) Leave *) leave in gPodder *) I leave them in gpodder. *) I leave them in gpodder. *) The episodes are automaticly deleted after synchronization. I don't use "save as". *) I leave them in gPodder, deleting them upon sync w/iPod Nano (1g). *) I sync them to my iPod and then delete them from gPodder. *) I leave my episodes in gPodder and delete it after I have listened them *) Export using mp3 sync with "delete after sync" - I always listen to them only on my mp3 player. *) Leaving them in gPodder *) I leave 'em there. *) Leave in gPodder *) I leave them in gPodder, I rarely I want to keep a local copy *) I leave them in gpodder. *) I leave them in gpodder and use the play or transfer buttons. Do you use the iPod/MP3 player or Bluetooth sync feature? With what? *) sync all downloads immediately to an iPod running Rockbox, delete all downloads immediately after that *) USB-stick like MP3 player *) Yes I use an ipod. About once a week I plug in my ipod and sync. I leave the episodes on my computer and on my ipod. I delete the episodes that I have listened to in gpodder. *) No. (I used the mass storage thing to get stuff on my mp3 player. I'll definitely use bluetooth once my new handy is here.) *) I use synchronization with mass storage device -- Nokia. *) I sync to an iPod video that I also use with gtkpod. *) I use the sync feature with my IAudio X5L (filesystem based mp3/ogg player) *) Yes, with my Nokia phone (OggPlay) - I remove the SD card and sync to that. *) I'm synchronize with my "Jens of Sweden", a file based mp3 player. gPodder deletes the file immediately after synchronization. *) I use the iPod sync feature with my iPod touch (see below) *) filesystembased MP3-player *) I use the bluetooth with my motorola A910. *) I have a rio karma but not got it working on ubuntu yet so not sync'd to that yet its something I would like to do in the future. *) Sometimes I use the sync feature with my iaudio M5 (filesystem based mp3 player), but I don't do it too often. *) I sync with a Cowon A2, file-system based. Works very well! Have you written custom scripts/utilities to fix gPodder annoyances? *) Not exactly. I made just something like "ls > playlist.m3u". *) Nope. They keep getting fixed before I get to figuring out Python. *) I have a gpodder-add.sh script that I use to add feeds from firefox (just runs 'gpodder -a "$@"') *) I also have a script that I run to create m3u files that I run after I sync to my mp3 player. *) Lastly, because my mp3 player does strange things with mp3 files that are too long, sometimes I have to use mp3splt on really long episodes. *) Nope, I don't know how to make stuff in Python. *) Once I used mp3splt inside gpodder to split large files, but I managed to get around the problem on my MP3-player. *) No I am not a programmer just a power user *) No, not yet. Once I learn some python I might. I was thinking of making something to let it convert videos to dpg or dsv format, for playing on the nintendo DS and then transfering them. Have you had problems with some feeds? (missing pubdate, length,...) *) Yes, I have several feeds that somehow don't work. I've contacted the administrators of the site with the problematic feeds but they never respond. I've more or less resigned to it. I can download the podcasts also with DownThemAll from that particular site. *) yes, but don't remember. *) Yes, I had a problem with one feed. It just started working one day. They must have fixed it. *) Yep. Illogical tags, missing pubdate. It's really annoyig. *) No consistently reproducible issues. *) The Onion Radio News (http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/radionews) sometimes cuts short on the iPod. It usually only cuts out the ad at the end, so I haven't bothered finding out where the problem is. *) http://linux-foundation.org/weblogs/openvoices/?feed=podcast length info is missing *) No, or at least not recently. *) I sometimes had to delete feedcache.db when feeds didn't load properly, but aside from that everything has been working fine for me. *) Yes, on a couple of occasions gpodder reports not being able to download several of the feed files other applications find the feed files okay. Deleting the feedcache.db file seems to work as a work around to fix this. *) I have also had two occasions were gpodder reported zero length on files in a feed. This was just before gpodder started reporting it couldn't find that feed file. *) Just one, which had a password. I sorted it out in the end. Are you using other podcast-related services that could be integrated into gPodder but currently aren't? *) I'm using amarok for audio podcasts because having 38 podcasts is something gpodder's gui doesn't handle very nice (See 2. question). *) I create the playlist-file (m3u) for my mp3-player manuelly *) Enhanced podcast support would be nice but impossible, considering that libgpod treats them as regular podcasts. *) Sometimes I look on the website of the podcast or the channel, because there are some intresting links related to the podcast or there is a blog with comments on the podcast. It would be useful to open the site from the contextmenu. *) Only podcast alley for finding new podcasts to try. There are so many podcast directories I was surprised to see you talking about building a directory into gpodder. I would have thought it would be better to not reinvent the wheel and integrate an existing directory. *) No, although a more complete podcast directory would have been helpful to start. Have you been using gPodders ogg-to-mp3 conversion feature for iPods? *) No. I didn't know there was such a feature. I may use it in the future. *) No, all of my podcasts come in mp3 flavor. (Never even run across an ogg formatted feed.) *) None of the ones I listen to are in ogg. *) My player supports ogg. *) No, have so far only used mp3 files. *) I'm not aware of that feature. Is it a recent SVN addition? *) No, don't need it. *) No, my mp3 player plays ogg vorbis. *) No, don't have an iPod. Are you running the SVN version of gPodder or which released version? *) SVN *) 0.11.0 from tarball at homepage. runs on Ubuntu Gutsy installed with checkinstall. *) I use the current fedora version. 0.10.4 *) Current release. *) SVN version. *) I run the SVN version. *) A fairly recent SVN. *) svn *) SVN *) 0.11.0 *) I'm using an outdated SVN version (timestamp: Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:15:40 +0100). *) 0.11.0 *) No I'm not sure how to do that I use the 64bit package off getdeb. *) svn version. *) gpodder 0.10.1 Comments/remarks: * please let us define priority podcasts that should always be synced to MP3 and others that can only be downloaded. E.g. If I would add some public radios my 2GB MP3 gets easily filled up. Neverthelless, I'd like to keep track of these stations... (Tim Michelsen ) -- start matt baker -- 1) As I said above I download podcast episodes to gpodder and then sync to my ipod. Lets say I listen to an episode before my next sync. When I sync the next time I see the episode show up as played in gpodder. I delete the episode in gpodder, but it stays on my ipod. After a month or two I use gtkpod to remove all podcasts from my ipod and then I sync all the unplayed ones back on to the ipod with gpodder. I'm sure its been suggested, but it would be nice if syncing deleted podcast episodes off the ipod. 2) A minor issue is when I first add a feed to gpodder, I usually download all the episodes. In the episode list I select all and then click the download button. It seems to take a while to add all the episodes to the download tab. I just queued up 100 episodes to download from a podcast. It took 2.5 min on my fast computer. When I had my older 1ghz computer It would take about 6 min to queue up the downloads. 3) The last minor issue is startup time. I was using a 1ghz computer and the startup time seemed really long. Now I'm using a faster computer so the startup time is better. 4) Ok. I thought of one more. The update file metadata feature is really cool, but for one of my podcasts it did not work very well. I believe the mp3 came with correct tag information, but the update file metadata feature overwrote the correct tag with blanks. You might consider not overwriting the fields if what you are going to write is a blank. -- end matt baker -- Stefan Lohmaier: I have 20 more audio podcasts. I tried to put them in gpodder too, but for me the gui isn't made for that. (An item above all podcasts for unwatched stuff would be nice or anything similar so you can get to all your unwatched stuff fast without having to look at the small numbers after the names.) -- start andy busch -- The only two things that are still a little fussy for me are download throttling and gtkpod-related syncing. I tried throttling my download to 40kb/s and three at once to not choke my system. But then when I'm down to the last one or two, it would be nice if it could speed back up. Maybe this was recently fixed, so I hope I'm not putting my foot in my mouth. Also, this is more of a gtkpod issue, but I use the extended database in gtkpod, so it has to check the SHA hashes of my files after I sync with gPodder. This eats up a good bit of time. I could disable it, but it would be nice if there was a way to make the two apps trust each other. Thanks again. I am consistently impressed with gPodder. It's come a long way very quickly. -- end andy busch -- it would be nice if syncing delete the deleted podcast episodes from the mp3-player (bernd schlaber gmail) -- start brian johnson -- -Sometimes I start a second instance when I forget that I have gPodder minimized to the tray - it would be nice to either not allow this, or pop-up the existing window. -Some podcasts I listen to are online classes, for these it would be nice if gPodder could download the oldest episodes first. -I have had to delete feedcache.db a few times due to corruption. -- end brian johnson -- --start pieter de decker -- Unfortunately, the iPod touch is not entirely supported by libgpod, which causes my iPod to not handle play counts correctly. Another disadvantage of using the Touch on Linux is that the wireless sync is slow as hell. That's why I have decided to move back to iTunes. I know that that's what Apple has been trying to make me do ever since I bought it by locking up the device, but they leave me no choice. I really appreciate all the volunteers that helped develop iPod management software for Linux. To everyone who contributed to gPodder, gtkpod and libgpod: you guys are awesome! I'll keep checking back on progress being made every so often though. --end pieter de decker-- -- start florian richter -- Generally, gPodder sometimes is a bit slow. More things like syncing with the mp3-player or updating the feeds should run in the background, so I can continue browsing through the feeds and marking podcasts for downloading and transfering to the mp3-player. -- end florian richter -- -- start chris newham -- Overall I love gPodder it seems a have a few quirks which I am hoping will be fixed in forthcoming releases. Personally I would like to see it working solid with no issues rather than adding more functionality eg podcast directory. When I switched to Linux I missed the juice podcast receiver I used under Windows. For a while I used hpodder but gpodder is the closest replacement I have found. Keep up the good work guys. -- end chris newham --