Hands On: Podcast Ready's myPodder

As an inveterate iconoclast, I generally don't mind that out of all the MP3 players I've owned, not a single one has been an iPod -- except when I go through my ritual of manually copying my downloaded podcasts to my MP3 player. Hence the appeal of Podcast Ready's free myPodder, which makes the whole process as just about as automatic as Apple's -- and one-ups the iPod, to boot.

First, let's clear a few things up. Although Podcast Ready's press release describes their technology as "O/S and device independent," what they really mean is that myPodder works on any MP3 player that's automatically recognized as external mass storage on a Windows computer. (The OS they're referring to is the MP3 player's, not the computer's.) Also, I'm never happy when a company tries to foist a new meaning on an existing term. If "podcast" was ever short for "personal on-demand broadcasts," it's news to me.

That said, myPodder, officially still in beta, works pretty darn well. The program is installed by extracting the files from the 7 MB ZIP file to the root directory of the MP3 player, and running myPodder directly from there. Everything is managed from a single window that has three tabs: My Channels, which lists your channels and available podcasts; Podcasts, for managing what you've downloaded; and myOptions, for your preferences as well as adding or removing podcasts.

The great thing about having everything on the MP3 player is that you're completely free of your computer. As fellow DW correspondent Martyn Williams discovered, it's a pain to try to synchronize podcasts on the iPod between multiple computers. With myPodder, you carry everything around with you in the player itself -- all you need is a PC with an Internet connection when you want to synchronize.

myPodder is a lean, mean, podcast-catchin' machine that got me hooked in a matter of minutes. If it can stay this spare and useful when it's out of beta (though a more refined installer would be nice, for people who don't care about ZIP files), us non-Apple podcast fans will finally have a convenient, more or less universal podcast manager to work with.

(Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I caught a reference to the Gnu Public License while playing around with myPodder. If that's the case, then there should be nothing to prevent someone from writing a Mac or Linux equivalent to myPodder that can work with its data. Updating my podcasts from any USB-enabled computer? Now that would be cool.)