A while back, I posted a little quandry I had where I wanted to have Juice
not check certain feeds automatically. One reason for wanting this
capability is that I subscribe to a science feed which often has episodes
about NASA and astronomy, my least favorite subjects. I would like to
avoid wasting their bandwidth and mine by only downloading episodes having
titles which catch my interest. While it is possible to look at the
episode list for a particular feed in Juice, it doesn't seem possible to
tell Juice not to automatically download new episodes. However, Replay AV
will do this very nicely. Here's how it works. You'll first need to find
the podcast in the Replay Guide and add it to your list of shows. If you
can't find it there, you'll need to find the correct URL for the podcast
and add it manually. Next, you'll want to edit the show properties for
that podcast, setting the schedule tab to "unscheduled." This will keep
Replay from checking the feed automatically. Now, to check the feed
manually, tab over to your list of shows, arrow down until you find the
podcast you want to check, hit the context key on your keyboard, and press
the letter G. This will take you to the guide and bring up the last three
or four episodes. You can look at the titles of each episode and decide
whether or not you want to download anything listed there. Of course,
ideally, you would check back periodically to see if anything new has been
posted. There are two little bits of weirdness about the replay guide that
I should point out. The download and add links are actually above the
episode, which is a tad unusual. Secondly, when looking at a podcast
description in the replay guide, it will say something like "last update
July 4." I don't know why it says that because, in the feeds I've looked
at, there are episodes listed much later than that date, so don't go by
that, go by the episode titles. I'm just finding that my hard drive is
filling up with podcast episodes I'm not really interested in, so this is a
good solution for me. Of course, using an RSS reader is a good option too.
Until next post, happy selective downloading!