Tom, it’s good to know I’m not completely insane and this problem affects others. I’m still completely staggered that an entire high-profile startup could miss a showstopping flaw like this, and they haven’t even bothered to reply when I asked them for feedback on this post. Meanwhile, lots of negative press for Podshow and Linkd also seems to work the same way as odeo – one big feed. No wonder people are content with ITunes, which I personally find too slow to navigate around and add new subs. I’m sticking with Podnova for now, even thoug the two-way sync process makes it difficult to delete anything. Will anyone get it right?

I solved this problem the way I solve most problems with inadequate web sites – I used a Perl script. I downloaded the m3u playlists, sorted, removed duplicates, and then use LWP to download the mp3s.

The script actually evolved from one I had written earlier to resolve the redirect URLs Odeo puts into the playlists. (The URL for every podcast hits an Odeo server, then redirects to the real podcast URL.) Their servers were frequently slow to respond, and WinAmp was timing out, and had no option to extend the timeout period. Resolving the redirects before loading the playlist into WinAmp solved that.

It’s been months since I last downloaded a batch of podcasts, and so I will be repeating this procedure again shortly…probably with some manual splitting of the sorted playlist, as I now have 4300 items in my inbox. The nice round number makes me suspect they have been trimming the older stuff or otherwise capping it at some limit.

Of course this doesn’t solve the problem for most Odeo users.

One solution to this problem is letting users create multiple inboxes or feeds. I suggested that to them a few times last year. That way you could split off stuff that is short and published daily from long format stuff published less frequently. I though they finally added this feature, but looking now I don’t see evidence of it. I guess one could always work around this limitation by creating multiple accounts…

-Tom

I’ve since switched to the itunes podcast directory, which means each podcast gets its own space on the ipod – much easier and simpler.