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MP3 players for podcasts

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40hz:

:) I think maybe I need to become a bit of a "power user."

I have a Sansa Clip + already, with vast amounts of music on it, spread between internal memory and a 32Gb micro SD card. I'm currently trying to work out if I should buy another one just for podcasts, buy an SD card just for podcasts that I swap with the music card when required, or something else entirely.
-oblivion (July 24, 2012, 05:33 AM)
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Easiest would be to just swap SD cards. :Thmbsup:

The difficult bit, I think, is keeping the playlist in synch with the files. I could edit the playlist with a text editor but that won't do the file management. I can move files around anyway I like but filenames aren't as helpful as the ID tags that the media software shows me.
-oblivion (July 24, 2012, 05:33 AM)
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I don't know about you, but I never felt the need to keep a full podcast list on my portable device. I'll listen to most podcasts once (or twice) and possibly archive them somewhere if I find a good one. Otherwise I treat of them as I would a  newspaper.

For podcasts that are a "series presentation" (where I do want to keep a complete archive) I'll keep (maybe) the last two or three episodes on my iPhone. The rest just go onto my home server in case I want to hear them again.

Since I've only got something like seven podcasts with a few episodes each for mobile use at any time, they could easily fit on a small capacity SD card despite giving me 20+ hours of listening.

And since that's such a small number of items to keep track of, it's easy for me to just 'drag and drop' without getting too fancy about it.

YMMV. :)

oblivion:
Easiest would be to just swap SD cards. :Thmbsup:-40hz (July 24, 2012, 07:07 AM)
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Cheapest, definitely. But the database rebuilding process is time-consuming and to go through that every time I put the 32Gb SD back in :shudder:

I don't know about you, but I never felt the need to keep a full podcast list on my portable device.
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That's not what I do. I never -- or very, very rarely -- listen to podcasts more than once, but I tend to accrue them slightly faster than I listen to them, with the result that I have a backlog. So my PC has a folder of unheard podcasts on it, and my MP3 player gets loaded with the oldest few from that folder -- depending on available space -- which get deleted from the PC straight away and deleted from the MP3 player in due course, once played. I don't want to get to a position where I've emptied the playlist, so once I've listened to maybe 2/3 of the 10-20 podcasts on the player, I delete the listened-to ones to make space and copy a new batch to the end of the playlist.

Is that weird? I'm starting to think nobody else does this, or anything like it...  :-[

And since that's such a small number of items to keep track of, it's easy for me to just 'drag and drop' without getting too fancy about it.

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Mostly, that relies on playback being acceptable if the order isn't an issue or if the player's very good about playing things back in the order delivered. My Zen wouldn't do that -- it always tried to sort things by artist -- and while I think the Clip might be better at handling things in the order written to disk, I'd rather take control, if possible.

I'm currently experimenting with Mediamonkey. It will export an m3u playlist directly to the player that I then have to hand-edit to remove the drive letter from each line, but it might do most of what I want, one way or another. (I just have to wait 20 minutes, while the media's refreshed, to find out!)

This is so blasted complicated that I am beginning to think that it IS me that's weird, here.  :-[

40hz:
This is so blasted complicated that I am beginning to think that it IS me that's weird, here.
-oblivion (July 24, 2012, 12:00 PM)
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Maybe a little?  (kidding, just kidding) :P

Well, good luck with whatever you work out. I can't see the point of building and maintaining a whole playlist for something I'm not going to keep - I just prefix my podcast filenames with a token character ("!") and then dump them on my player for listening. Lookup by name puts them at the top of the directory list. I'll later delete whatever I have listened to the next time I 'reload' it.

But that's me - so I may also be equally weird in a different way.



 :Thmbsup:

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