gPodder 3.0.0 removed support for the old method of syncing podcasts to portable audio players. Some people have expressed their sadness about seeing that feature go. The feature as it was implemented in 2.x was not well maintained, and while it worked, it didn't provide the necessary flexibility that users demanded (see bug list below), so we decided to remove it in 3.x (which also made it possible to clean up some other spots). Of course, there's no problem with re-implementing an even better device sync module for 3.x, and this is what this Wiki page is about.
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Please help us understand how you used or want to use the device sync in the past and in the future, so we can have an idea about what is important to you and what not. Simply add a subsection here, describe your use case and leave some way of contacting you, so we can get back to you in case we have further questions. Please also add yourself as volunteer below if possible.
I use gPodder for sync my player (Generic Chinese player based file system). I connect the player to the computer and cron run sync of gPodder every 10 minutes. I'd like that the software will automatically sync itself (bug 864). Hatul 13:43, 30 November 2011 (UTC)
I sync audio podcasts with my Sansa player. I prefer to listen to podcasts in FIFO order, although I will edit to move important ones up. My process is a bit unwieldy, however:
I also want to move to running gpodder portable (currently at version 2.20, although 3.0 is in the works) but I haven't decided whether I will download directly to the device or not. I tend to have more podcasts ready than will fit on the device thus I use sync to always have current podcasts ready, but decide which ones to copy to the device. Rsleegers
I start gPodder every day after booting my desktop PC (my desktop isn't always on) and check for new updates. But if my PC is running, gPodder is running too and checks for new episodes every 20 minutes. My device isn't always plugged in because it looses the position for the current playing podcast when connecting the charger or the usb connection to a PC. So I mostly synchronize after listen to a podcast episode and before I start a new one. Sometimes I have to remember the position if I want to transfer episodes before I finished listen to a episode. So this is my usecase step by step
Some thoughts:
I'm a long time gpodder user. Git pull every so often. Haven't reported many bugs lately, as I haven't found any!
I loved the sync feature. I had gpodder configured to prepend a datestamp to each filename, and to store them on my local computer. I did this because I'm several months behind in my daily podcasts.
I would then move the files, one by one, by date, to my file system-based MP3 player. It played the MP3s in the order they were copied, thusly the one by one nature to preserve the natural order of the daily podcasts.
So now I have to send each file to the local file system, then delete it. A little bit of a hassle now, but I'm limping along.
Ideally, if I can ever catch up on my backlog, I'd remove the podcasts on my MP3 player, and upon the next sync, they'd disappear from gpodder.
I don't sync at all anymore. My mobile device has been an Android phone for a few years now and there's no client. So I just have separate subscription lists. Video podcasts on my desktop with gpodder and audio podcasts on my phone with DoggCatcher.
I wish I could:
I have no desire to physically connect a cable between devices to sync. That seems pretty old school and fraught with possible issues.
Thanks for gpodder!
I use gPodder on Ubuntu to sync my Sandisk Sansa Clip+ in MSC mode. This player has a dedicated PODCAST folder and all files in this folder have playback continue support.
I currently use file-based syncing to the PODCAST folder. The player requires correct tagging, so I use a small post-download script to re-tag all downloaded files using the channel and title variables.
The implementation of both syncing and scripting in version 2.20 work without problems for me.
I use gPodder on Ubuntu to sync my Android phone in USB device mode. I am still on 2.20 and so use the device sync feature. Works ok for me. However, I would like to:
(Significant overlap with User Story 4, but I wanted to add mine anyway.)
I currently run gPodder 2.20 on my LMDE laptop, and use an iRiver B20 mp3 player to listen to the podcasts on. I have around 60 podcasts that are captured, some daily, some weekly, others less frequent, and a mixture of professional (BBC, Absolute etc), semi-pro (Linux Outlaws, Bugcast etc) and amateur (Soundcloud)
My routine is:
Prefer to use the mp3 player, as run podcasts faster than normal (reduces the time to listen) and I've yet to find a way for my Android phone to do this.
I sync gPodder with my Android phone. I manually refresh my gPodder feeds when my device gets low on new items to listen to. I connect my phone to my computer, mount it, and manually hit the sync button for gPodder.
When I finish a podcast I delete it on the computer, and rely on gPodder to delete it from my device. It would be nice if I could delete the item from my device and have gPodder recognize it as deleted and delete my PC's copy.
I use gPodder with a vanilla 4GB thumb drive as device - this integrates directly with my car's (Prius) audio system. Once a week, I ...
and I'm good to go for the whole week. gPodder, deletes the old ones, copies across the new ones and keeps the USB stick neat and tidy with no effort on my part.
I miss this facility so much that I'll stick with version 2.3 until it's back!
I'm using a good Player (Sansa Fuze v2) with an alternative FreeSoftware-Firmware (RockBox).
What I would love to see is a feature to mark the podcasts as played/unplayed from within RockBox so that it would be deleted at the next sync. The feature "lastfm" doesn't work that well. Because, what happens with a podcast that I had only listened 80%?
Please define a sync-protocol-foo that will be integrated into RockBox (I would do that). So that rockbox will list the new podcasts, and so on..
I'm using file system based mp3/ogg player. gPodder (2.20) runs always and checks for a new podcasts every 20 minutes. I use it for video podcast as well as for audio. Audio podcasts I hear usually on my portable player and video podcasts I watch always on PC. So gPodder is media center for my online content.
I have subscribed around 100 feeds. Some feeds I like very much and download every episode as soon as it is online. But other feeds are not so interesting and I download only certain selected episodes. I've used Amarok 1.4 as podcatcher before. It has a very useful feature, that I miss in gPodder. It is selective autodownload. In Amarok I can turn auto download mode only by certain (favorite) feeds on. Afterwards I do not care about new episodes any more.
I am trying to download interesting episodes as soon as they are online. New podcasts are waiting for syncing on my harddrive sometimes for a long time. When I plug in my mp3 player, I remove first old played episodes from player by hand using gpodder ("Select and remove episodes from device"). Afterwards I select unplayed downloaded episodes and sync they to my player. These episodes are marked as played and will be removed soon after syncing.
I have previously used gpodder2 to download and sync podcasts to my iPod Classic 6.5G. It worked well, because half of the podcasts had no ID3 tags and the file names were made of random digits, and gPodder was smart enough to embed the metadata from the XML feed into the actual MP3 files so that the episodes had meaningful names on the player.
As of recently version 2 suddenly stopped syncing because of missing dependencies which after an upgrade do not seem to be available anymore in the repos or in AUR (in Archlinux).
Once a week I would typically delete old episodes from the `~/gpodder/downloads` folder (typically 2 or 3 GBs) and then update the feeds, go through the descriptions and select the ones I want. Now that syncing does not work in either v2 or v3 I am only using gPodder for downloading.
After the files are downloaded I have to run a python script which prepends the parent folder name to those MP3 files with random file names and no ID3 tags, and then use gtkpod for copying the files to the iPod. During the copy process gtkpod often crashes, especially when drag-and-dropping entire subfolders, but generally it works and I can almost live with it.
I used to have gpodder.net syncing enabled but stopped using it because it takes longer than normal and speed does matter.
I wish gPodder had an option to populate the ID3 tags with data from RSS feeds in those cases when the MP3 files have no tags and the file names are not meaningful. I realize that there is no way to programatically determine if a name is meaningful, but an option to ignore original file names and use XML data would be very nice.
I noticed that in about 75% of cases gPodder reports incorrect file sizes prior to starting the download, but I suspect that it is related to incorrect content length being reported by the server or by the RSS feed itself.
Update: I have written an extention to cover my use case (see movetoipod.py), it works reliably, but is mising some goodies and user feedback features.
I use gpodder with an Ipod Classic 160Gb. There are always problems when syncing. First I used to this:
However, i began noticing that old podcasts began appearing as music.
My new procedure is the following:
This works ok.
I've been using gPodder 2 on Linux for a few years now to download podcasts and sync them to a Sandisk Sansa Clip+ player. It worked almost perfectly, exactly the way I needed. Thanks! Now I've switched to OSX, and installed almost native gPodder 3. It works better, and I really miss the old sync feature. I've got a few issues with the new one:
I'm ready to help with this!
--Eugene (talk) 21:20, 29 April 2013 (BST)
If you would like to volunteer in helping to get this feature back into 3.x, please add yourself, and describe the device you are using and what you want to contribute (i.e. developing or just testing or documentation, etc..).
