To help you understand the process of subscribing to a podcast, here we are going to look at the open-source phenomenon Juice. Juice is a podcatcher, a podcatcher is piece of software that allows you to subscribe to a podcast feed or subscription address and the podcatcher will automatically download any new episodes as they become available, this particularly useful if you decide to listen to many podcasts as it saves you from having to visit each individual website and download the show manually. You can even synch it with your mp3 player so that the podcatcher automatically loads your podcasts on to the player ready and waiting for you whenever your set to listen.

Juice was the first major podcatching software and remains a popular alternative to using iTunes, especially if you don’t have an iPod. Its development team credited the program concept to Adam Curry and Dave Winer, said to be the fathers of podcasting.

Firstly downloading and installing Juice is a simple affair and comes in three flavours for Mac, PC and Linux (coming soon). Upon opening the program you will be greeted by the subscription page, this will be empty as we haven’t subscribed to any podcasts yet.

Luckily Juice comes with it own built in directory, whilst this is far from comprehensive it does provide us with the most popular feeds and is an excellent place to start in your discovery on the myriad of podcasts available. Navigate your way to the directory by clicking on the tabs and you will presented with a list of organizations that provide links to shows (as shown in fig2). Podcast Alley’s top 50 for instance is a good place to start, clicking one of these will reveal a list of shows, simply double click on a show that takes your fancy in order subscribe and save. You will then be taken back to subscription page where your choice will be automatically highlighted and it will look for any episodes that are already available for that show, tick the boxes for the episodes you want and press the big green button at the top and away it will go and download your choices.

Now what if you want to subscribe to a show that you like the sound of whilst browsing, well that’s a similar process. First you need to find the subscription address, look for the XML or RSS buttons and click for details, it may look something like this:

anypodcast.com/rss.xml
or
feeds.feedburner.com/anypodcast

Fig. 1 shows an XML file with the subscription address to the Daily Source Code highlighted, copy the similar address for your chosen show into Juice.

Fig. 1

Next paste the address into the feed box on the directory page as shown in Fig.1 and click on ‘Add’

Fig. 2

This process is relatively simple and intuitive and in any case after you’ve subscribed to a few shows the process becomes second nature.

Juice has some other useful features which help you manage your daily download of content, a quick look around the tabs will reveal such things as a scheduler which is a must have feature in any podcatcher as this allows you to set the time interval for when it checks to see if the latest podcasts are available, this can set at intervals from 30 minutes to 12 hours. We recommend setting it to check every two hours as this seems a reasonable spread and you can grab your favourite shows as soon as it’s available.

Preferences will reveal a set of options allowing you to do everything from setting the default download folder, running Juice in the system tray, rss file associations, setting the file path to your mp3 player, choosing the default desktop media player which include iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp and if you set it to no player it will use the player of your choice, a very useful function.

Fig. 3

In our tests Juice proved to be very reliable and if a podcast fails to download for any reason it will try again at the next scheduled check and functionality in day to day use was good, for instance if you just want listen to a show, just right click on an item and click on ‘play episode’ to listen or watch with your favourite player. (Fig. 3)

There are many podcatchers available today but we can heartily recommend Juice as an excellent choice to grab your daily download.

Get Juiced

Other Podcatchers available:

Doppler

Podnova

Nimiq

iTunes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 at 7:29 pm by Daniel Sussex and is filed under Software. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.