I mentioned in yesterday’s audio podcast that it would be nice if ipodder clients did more to manage your collection of online audio from podcasts. I suggested that you might want to pick a size such as 10gb that you are willing to use for podcasts. As new podcasts come in, the oldest would be deleted to maintain that 10gb boundary. Perhaps (similar to Tivo) you could also click either feeds or individual shows that would be retained longer.
This morning Dave Winer remarked that Todd Maffin wanted to be able to delete stuff off his ipod. If you go to his post, he wanted something slightly different: when he had listened to something, he wanted it to go away from his playlist. But more than just complaining, he had an actual suggestion: use the rating system built into the ipod in combination with the smart playlist capability. When you rate an item in your New Playlist, it is deleted from the New Playlist and added to your Heard playlist. Great idea, since I don’t normally use the “Rated” sections anyway.
Why not just use the playcount attribute of the tracks? I’ve got a smart playlist called “.Playlists – Unplayed” that lists all tracks with genre of “podcast” and playcount = 0. When I’ve finished a track, it automatically drops out of the playlist. No setting of ratings or anything… Oh, and I prepend the playlist with “.” so it shows up at the top of my iPod playlist menu.