ANN: FeedStation 1.6 Beta and “My Podcasts”

Published on by Nick Bradbury

FeedStation 1.6Today we announced a new beta version of FeedStation, which until now has strictly been FeedDemon’s podcast client. As of today, FeedStation supports NewsGator Online, our free web-based aggregator, and it will soon be supported by NewsGator Outlook Edition.

Using FeedStation 1.6 with NewsGator Online

If you’re a NewsGator Online user, you may have noticed this innocent looking folder hanging out under your clippings:

My Podcasts folder

This new “My Podcasts” folder is where you store podcasts you want to listen to. Getting podcasts into this folder is easy – just click the new “Add to Podcasts” icon that appears below any item that contains an enclosure, like the one shown below:

Adding to My Podcasts

Starting with the new beta, FeedStation will (optionally) poll your My Podcasts folder for new podcasts and automatically download them to your iPod or Windows Media Player device. Geek that I am, I love the idea that you can add to My Podcasts on one computer and have FeedStation on another computer, copying stuff to your iPod for you.

If you’re new to FeedStation – or the whole podcasting thing in general – you’d probably like a little help getting started. The first thing you’ll need is a set of feeds that contain podcast enclosures. If you’re logged into NewsGator Online, just click the link below to import an OPML file containing several podcast feeds:

http://www.bradsoft.com/feeds/opml/Podcasters.opml

The first time you run FeedStation after downloading it, it will ask for your NewsGator Online user name and password and automatically enable the My Podcasts integration for you. However, you’ll need to let FeedStation know which media player you want the podcasts copied to – to do this, select Tools > Options, then switch to the Podcasts tab. This page on my site provides the rest of the details.

Using FeedStation 1.6 with FeedDemon

If you’re a FeedDemon user, upgrading the bundled copy of FeedStation to the new beta version is easy – just download and install it, and it will replace your existing version. Although you can click “Skip” on the welcome screen to use FeedStation without a NewsGator Online account, you’ll obviously need an account if you want to try the My Podcasts integration.

Giving Due Credit

For almost a decade now I’ve been used to announcing things that I created by myself, but this time I’m announcing something that involved several of my NewsGator co-workers. So I’d like to acknowledge the late nights of development work by Darryl Dreiling and Doug Furcht, QA work by Katriana Hutchison and Ria Kaur, and oversight by Ed Jukkola that was required to make this happen. Nice job, folks :)

Update: Here’s Greg Reinacker’s post about the new FeedStation.

20 thoughts on “ANN: FeedStation 1.6 Beta and “My Podcasts””

  2. This is *perfect*. It’s always annoyed me that enclosure-only feeds triggered the usual new post notification, now I can move then into NewsGator and just leave FeedStation running :D

  3. erm… I take that back. I couldn’t find a way to make it automatically subscribe to a podcast, you have to manually click “add to podcasts” on each entry before FeedStation picks it up.
    Stretching the definition of podcasting if you ask me!

  4. Andrew – we talked about adding that functionality (auto-download all enclosures for a particular feed), but it just didn’t make it into the current release. It’s likely we’ll add it…although a lot of folks have told us that they prefer to just download individual items.

  5. Podcasting, Business Intelligence, and Gnomedex

    Gnomedex starts tomorrow (ok – I guess it officially started tonight, but I chose to spending the evening gorging on sushi with Amy and then watching the Spurs crunch the Pistons.)  I’m not a conference guy (I get restless) but I happe…

  6. Podcasting, Business Intelligence, and Gnomedex

    Gnomedex starts tomorrow (ok – I guess it officially started tonight, but I chose to spending the evening gorging on sushi with Amy and then watching the Spurs crunch the Pistons.)  I’m not a conference guy (I get restless) but I happe…

  7. ahh, that makes sense. I think it’s interesting that despite podcasting taking off due to the automatic subscriptions, the majority of the growth has been by people who still manually download.
    I’m happy knowing that the functionality is coming, but as a FD user I just won’t get any use out of this feature until then :)

  8. What a coincident : I use HomeSite while it being brought over by Allaire then Macromedia. I uses FeedDemon now it was “sold”. But I am glad the piece of software are maturing and gain support and regonication.

  9. I can no longer drag and drop MP3 files into FeedStation from FeedDemon. That’s a wee bit of an annoyance, but one I can overlook.
    Also, adding the red ‘X’ next to a feed once its done downloading is weird. It looks like there’s an error. Red usually indicates something like a warning, and in this case it looks like it’s done, but with errors.
    You might consider doing something where after completion FeedStation waits for 60 seconds and then fades the line out and removes the line item. In short, I’d like to only see what I have remaining on my list of feeds to download.
    Anyway, thanks for the update/upgrade! Looks nice over all.

  10. Randy, drag-and-drop is a very important feature of FeedStation, so if it’s not working, it’s a bug rather than a deliberate omission.
    However, I just tested this using an IT Conversations MP3 link, and it worked as expected. Is this problem something you’re seeing with multiple sites, or just a specific one?

  11. PS: Randy, the red “X” should only appear for items that are in your queue but don’t have a downloaded file (ie: the download isn’t on your hard drive, at least not in the folder specific in FeedStation’s settings as the download folder).

  12. The drag and drop is working now. I should have tried restarting FS (doh!) Sorry for the false bug report. Thanks for the clarification of the red x as well :)

  13. NOD32 will not let you install this software…it identifies it as a virus…
    File:
    C:\Program Files\Bradbury\FeedDemon\is-S8VQJ.tmp
    Threat:
    probably unknown NewHeur_PE virus
    Comment:
    Event occurred on a new file created by the application: C:\DOCUME~1\Alex\LOCALS~1\Temp\is-N1PJF.tmp\is-HQLFR.tmp. The file was moved to quarantine. You may close this window.
    And it messed up my FeedStation instal now so I cannot test the program anymore! :(
    May I have a cookie for finding this (aka license for FeedDemon) :)

  14. OK – but what about subscriptions to regular podcasts? Do I have to manually move over each podcast to “My Podcasts” or can I “identify” a particular feed as being a podcast feed and always have it move those items to that folder?

  19. (From my reply to Morgan’s post in the forums)
    We haven’t heard reports from any other AV users.
    Since most engines include some type of heuristic support, I can only presume that this is a problem specific to NOD32. I’ve sent an email to the developer looking into how we can address this. In the meantime, the only workaround that I can determine is to temporarily disable the heuristic engine (if possible, otherwise the entire AV application) to install the FeedStation beta.
    To repair the loss of FeedStation 1.5, you should be able to just re-run the FeedDemon installation. Let me know if that doesn’t work.
    I’ll update when I hear back from NOD32.

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