Automatically syncing my podcasts to an mp3 player

While looking for a way to automatically synchronize my Zen Micro I stumbled onto the following article by Pete Kay. After reading his post and watching the step-by-step guide I had a good feeling that this solution would be very solid. Following his steps, I implemented it and have been using it now for over a week.

I can officially say that I have reached my goal of setting up a situation where I grab my portable mp3 player on my way out the door in the morning and all my podcasts/music/content have been synced on it for me to listen to on the way to/from or at work.

Once thing I would like to re-stress is how to keep your playlist clean as you sync. Using the following will allow files to be automatically removed from your mp3 device. Using Juice (formally know as iPodder), you can set the clean up on a subscription basis. Do this by selecting a subscription and going to its properties. There should be a Cleanup tab. Check the “Automatically delete episodes more than” and then set a days value.

A good example of how I use this is with the woot.com podcast subscription. This podcast is a daily. So I have the clean up process to remove anything that is a day old. So when I sync my playlist will only contain that days woot podcast. This keeps my podcast clean and refresh and removes any manual task of removing any podcasts.

The way I have it set up is that eventually all podcast that get synced will be removed at some point in time. All my subscriptions in Juice are setup to automatically delete. I see no real value in saving past podcasts. Until there is a way to maybe search them quickly to find information you are looking for it seems almost worthless to keep old podcasts around. I actually ran into this situation this past week. I heard something on a TWiT podcast and a couple days later I wanted to revisit the segment of interest. I manually seeked through the podcast once again but never found what I was looking for. So to me once I have listened to it I have no real motivation to either listen to it again or save it for future reference.

Heck, there is so much great content out there to listen to everyday why would I want to listen to something a second time.