I have been getting reports over the past week of listeners are running into trouble automatically down-loading shows because stand alone Podcatchers like Juice are no longer functional in the new operating system.
The lack of Podcatcher development in the Podcast Community has been a very sore subject with me for a long time. The community cut their own throat, in not keeping their code and directories current when Apple iTunes become the default down-load application for many.
The simple fact is that much of the once evolutionary software has become abandonware.
I am putting out a appeal to the developers of Juice, Doppler and other PodCatcher applications to release the complete source code so that applications can be updated to be Vista ready.
I would be willing to help steward that development and provide some seed money to help facilitate the updates.
@knox,
What settings are you using with Vista? Are you running it as a Standard Account user or an Admin Account user? Have you disabled Vista’s User Account Control altogether? Are you using XP-compatibility mode?
Or, the short question: What did you do to make it work?
When I run Juice from my Standard account with XP-compatibility mode turned on, I get a message saying to check the juice.exe.log for details.
The log says:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “gui.py”, line 4, in ?
File “iPodderGui.pyc”, line 3573, in main
File “ipodder\configuration.pyc”, line 468, in __init__
File “os.pyc”, line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘C:\\Users\\Jeff\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts’
The fact that Visual Studio has a lot of compatibility issues with Vista itself is probably contributing to this problem.
I share your concern, though. Podcatcher development seemed to stall after iTunes came around… which is really quite disappointing given that iTunes very obviously has some drawbacks. It eats system resources for lunch and makes something as simple as updating a few podcasts a slow process even on high end systems.
Hi Todd,
A quick search on sourceforge.net for “podcast aggregator” yields 214 results. I’m not so sure there is a shortage. For sure the vast majority are using ITunes, but I don’t think everyone’s given up.
Personally, I’m running Juice on my Ubuntu Edgy box. Works great for me.
And I would be amiss if I didn’t point out bashpodder as well. ;)
Problem is the open-source code does not include the interface shell.
Hi Todd:
After reading your post, I think it is clear that the problem lies with the developers of podcatcher applications and not with Vista. As a result, I wonder why you choose your title as you did. Shouldn’t it be something like, “Podcast Community Loosing Listeners because of Abandon Ware Podcatcher Applications!”
I’ve used various beta versions of Vista for over a year and now have Vista Ultimate. My listening to podcasts over the past year has skyrocketed. What I have done is abandon the abandon-ware. I don’t use any of them anymore and I have gigabytes of podcasts.
I respect your calling on the podcatcher application developers to pick up the pace. If they don’t, the fault lies with them and not with Vista.