My iPod, purchased for $100 from my mom, who bought it from my sister when she didn’t want it, who bought it from my other sister when SHE didn’t want it, has been limping along for a while now. It’s had weird battery problems since I’ve had it- this was OK, since I charged it every night. Lately though, it started only playing sound out of one channel, and then that channel started to cut out too.

I have two back up MP3 players- a 2 GB Sansa Clip and a 1GB Creative Zen Nano Plus, but I’ve never set up either for podcasts, which is what I use the MP3 player for about 90% of the time. The thing I LOVED about the iPod is that it would automatically download my podcasts and sync them when I hooked the player up to the computer, and would delete the ones I’d already listened to. As far as I know, no other MP3 player can replicate this functionality.

I can’t afford another iPod right now, though, so I started looking into the best possible solution for my Sansa Clip, which has a podcast folder separate from the music folder. One nice feature of the Clip is that you can delete files directly from the device. This took care of one of my problems- I didn’t want to have to go through all the podcasts every evening and figure out which ones I’d already listened to. The Clip will also remember where I am partway through a podcast. So all I needed was an easy way to download podcasts and get them on the device.

I have gone through this before. I went thorough every podcatcher I could find for Windows and every program had some little annoyance. So this time I tried Linux programs. I attempted Amarok first, but the podcatching features on that are a little… opaque. So after a little search, I hit upon gpodder. This little program does exactly what I want- lets me subscribe to a podcast feed, download new episodes, and transfer them over to the device. The one little catch is that you have to set the mode on the Clip (Settings -> USB mode) to MSC before Ubuntu will recognize the device.

I have been using my new setup for about a week now and am pretty happy. As long as I remember to delete the podcast from the device, everything goes smoothly. There are some advantages as well- the Clip is tiny, and I can clip it (big surprise, huh) to my clothes- esp. handy when I don’t have pockets. The 2 GB of space can hold a good number of podcasts- I save 1 GB for podcasts and the other GB for a “shuffle” selection of music. The Clip is a durable little player too- I’ve washed the player once, and it still works. I’ve dropped it multiple times. It has sat around in the bottom of my bag with my keys, and still looks (almost) new.

I was thinking of asking for another iPod for xmas, but now I am not so sure. I do like having all of my music on one device, but it’s really not that big a deal. The 120 GB iPod classic model is a little bit of overkill for me. The 16GB ipod nano would fit almost all the music I care to keep with me; that’s a little tempting. I worry about the durability, though- my old iPod scratched easily, and the way I mistreat MP3 players, I really need something durable. (Same goes for phones, incidentally)

I’ll probably stick with the Clip for now. Besides being cost effective, this means I can start moving away from the proprietary iTunes, which I find too big and clunky for my tastes. It also has weird non standard ways of storing things, which bugs me no matter what program I am using.

Image Credit: Clip on keyboard by BuhSnarf