Songbird is a wonderful media center application, though it currently has a few problems with podcasts:
- it's very picky about RSS feeds. It'll pick up some MP3s, but not others.
National Public Radio (NPR) feeds in the US seem to suffer from this problem.
- it'll try and download every podcast in a feed's history, rather than just the most recent one.
Here's a small hack to resolve both problems. It'll make sure the feed is one that Songbird understands and will only include the most recent podcast in the feed.
Simply paste the URL to the RSS or Atom feed
for your podcast in the field above, click the "Generate" button and copy the Songbird feed URL. Then, in Songbird:
- Choose "New Subscription" from the "File" menu;
- Paste the copied URL and choose a download location;
- Rename the playlist that's created for you to something more meaningful. By default, Songbird will call the playlist "yahoo.com".
This hack has been created using Yahoo! Pipes.
While you're here, why not check out Affixa? It's a must-have tool for Gmail or Yahoo! Mail users.