I must admit, I’m a little bit frustrated with the current crop of ipodder clients. I don’t know if it is just me, but I’m finding them to be relatively unreliable, and remarkably difficult to work with.

Before I go off (and people respond in kind with flames), I’ll admit it could just be me and/or my trusty WinXP box. But here’s my experience in trying to use ipodder, version 1.1.4.

It mostly worked, but for some reason I had frequent crashes of iTunes when I would run it. Sometimes, this would mean that individual podcasts which had been downloaded would be marked as downloaded and never retried, but even though they were downloaded, they would never get added to my iTunes list. So, I’d have to go in by hand and add them. Every attempt to get ipodder to redownload and add these skipped files (including uninstalling and reinstalling ipodder) resulted in it thinking it had already gotten it. I grovelled around, and found the history file and deleted that, and still no dice. In frustration, I thought I’d give another client a try:

Witness Doppler. Also a nice looking client, but it occasionally errors out while downloading as well, and fails to retry in any useful way. For reasons which escape me, I’m not receiving Dave Slusher’s podcasts, and even my own Cinnamon Bear Podcast has managed to skip three or four episodes. Sigh.

Here’s my wishlist for podcasting:

1. I’d like a client that is invisible. Never fails. Don’t even know it’s there. Works by magic.
2. Don’t care if it has directory support. Not even a bit.
3. On the rare, unforseen occasion when it does screw up, make it straightforward to fix. Allow you to flag items which it think it has already downloaded, and delete it from its history mechanism so they can be fetched again. When you uninstall the program, delete every trace of its previous installation.

Can anyone suggest a client which fufills these requirements?