step by step

[Dave]

Please help me to use your site. I want to download content to my mp3 player. Could you take an example of a podcast from your extensive list and show the steps required to move it to Juice, Yahoo, or any other service that enables downloads.
eg. Step 1 Choose podcast
Step 2 etc.

Thanks.

Dave

[imported_EclecticMix]

Dave -

Sure thing.

Go to http://eclecticmix.com/ (for example). On the home page you will see a little button that says "RSS". Click it and it will take you to another page (sometimes you will get a page of code, which is fine). The location you have gone to is the podcast's "feed address" - in this case it is http://feeds.feedburner.com/eclecticmix . Select this address and copy it into the clipboard (Ctrl-C).

Next, open Juice (an excellent choice for a podcatcher). Click on the "Subscriptions" tab. This is where all of your subscriptions are located (obviously). To add a subscription click the green button with the plus sign. This will bring up a window with a text box titled "URL". Click within this box and paste (Ctrl-V) the feed address you saved in the clipboard. Click the Save button.

The program will then use that feed address to gather information about the podcast. You will see that the name in the top of the Subscriptions window will change to "Eclectic Mix" and below that all of the available shows will be displayed. The most recent show will have a checkmark, which means that it is set to be downloaded the next time you ask for this to be done. You can check as many shows as you want to have downloaded.

If you have more than one podcast in your list of subscriptions, clicking on a show will display all of the available shows for that podcast. Any shows with green circles that have a triangle within, instead of a check box, have already been downloaded.

You can download all scheduled shows by clicking the green box with the two arrows pointing to one another. Since podcasts are in the 5-50Meg range in size, this can take a while. Before you do this, however, there are two things that will be helpful for you.

The first is to choose the location for the downloaded files. To tell the program where to put the files go to File -> Preferences. Within this window, in the General tab, is the field, "Download podcasts into this folder." Browse to the location convenient to you and select it. Each podcast will then be downloaded into its own directory within your specified location, for instance, the above podcast will be placed into an "Eclectic Mix" folder.

There are a lot of other choices you can make within the Preferences tab, but you can consider them later.

The other thing to do is to schedule the downloads. You don't have to do this, but it makes things very convenient. Go to Tools -> Scheduler. Make sure that the "Enable scheduler" box is checked, make sure the "Check at specific times" radio button is selected, and check the box next to the first time (which in my case is 4:46). Click Save.

What you have done is to schedule the program to wake up at 4:46am, go through all of your subscriptions to see if there are any new shows, then download the new ones it finds. When you wake up in the morning you can look at the Downloads tab to see what had downloaded overnight.

It doesn't get much more convenient than that (BTW, when you delete entries in the Downloads window, it only removes the listing from that window, it does not delete the file from your computer).

So now that you have downloaded a bunch of Eclectic Mix shows you can move them to your mp3 player and/or burn them to a CD (I do both with my subscriptions). Since Eclectic Mix comes out every Saturday, as long as you have Juice running (clicking the "X" doesn't actually end the program, it puts it into your system tray), you will download a new show every week. Who knows, you may even find other podcasts as good as Eclectic Mix! <g>

Please let me know if you have any other questions or if anything I have noted above is not clear. I do check these boards but can also be reached via EclecticMix At Gmail.com.

Cheers -

george

[Dave]

George,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'll let you know jpe it worked for me. It sounds like you know what you're talking about.

Thanks again,

Dave

[imported_EclecticMix]

Just thought I'd let you know that I went ahead and posted this information at http://eclecticmix.com/subscribe/subscribe.htm. I included pictures to ensure that it was as easy as possible.

Cheers -

george