What do I need to download and where do I find the software to access podcasts?
Podcasts come in all sorts of formats. Many of them work through iTunes.
iTunes will not sync with the Sansa, though. It’s selling some other kind of mp3 player, I forget what it’s called. Just download into a directory on your computer where you can find the mp3, and transfer it over like a music file.
Many other podcasts are just mp3s that you can download with Save… or Save Target As… or Save Link As. \
Another good podcast collector is Juice.
No matter how you get the podcasts, you are going to need to check their ID3 tags to make them work right on the Sansa. There’s no standard way podcasts are tagged.
Look at this FAQ, get mp3tag from the link in the FAQ, and use it to make your podcasts easy to find on the Sansa. One thing you can do with podcasts is use the Genre tag–and make the genre for podcasts…Podcasts.
From personal experience, I highly recommend Ziepod. I am (sigh) a Podcast adict. I’ve tried a lot of podcast agregators and my favourite is the free version of Ziepod.
Go here: http://www.ziepod.com/
They have the free version which just supports audio podcasts and the Ziepod+ which has video podcast support. You can set it to just minimise to your system tray, it uses very little in the way of system resourses, you can edit ID3 tags and you should be able to synchronise it with your Fuze (I don’t use that feature as I just drag and drop). It’s very cutomisable to suite your exact needs, the help files on the site should answer most of your quesitons, but the best part is, that the authors are contactable by email and alway provide great help and are very prompt in responding.
Try it. As I said, it’s free, so you can always uninstall it if you don’t like it.
I would also be more than happy to answer any questions about it as best I can.
Normally, if you’re using iTunes, podcasts are already in MP3 format. If they’re not, you can right-click the downloaded file in iTunes and click “Create MP3 version”.
@mlp48 wrote:
What do I need to download and where do I find the software to access podcasts?
Another option besides those already mentioned is MediaMonkey. Not only are there directories of podcasts in it that you can browse through,but you can find others at their native websites. For example, almost all of the ones I used to get through *shudder* iTunes I now get without it. One example…the CNET Daily News podcast. I used to get it through iTunes, but I would have to let it download into the computer, then copy and paste/drag and drop them into my Sansa.
When I got rid of the bloated system hog that was iTunes, I went to http://www.cnet.com/podcasts/ scrolled down till I found it, and copy and pasted the RSS feed link into the space for it on MediaMonkey, and voila! every afternoon, MM would load it in, and I could sync it right into my Sansa.
