iTunes 4.9

So iTunes 4.9 is out and the podcasting support is pretty cool.  It does pretty much what you’d expect – podcasts appear in a new “Podcasts” “special playlist” just under the “Library” icon.  It does keep track of whether or not you’ve listen to a particular podcast or not so you can keep track of where you’re up to and has a bunch of configuration options for how to handle incoming feed entries and how long to keep stuff.

The iTunes Music Store now has a new podcasts section (not sure if it’s available to impoverished countries like Australia or not – I have a US iTMS account) which has a respectable number of offerings considering it’s just been released.  The biggest problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a good way to browse podcasts – the “Browse” view seems a bit buggy at the moment, or at least just not intuitive – I keep winding up browsing songs to buy instead of podcasts to subscribe to.  Sadly, this seems to be a common problem with podcasts – too hard to find any good ones.

On that note, if anyone knows of any good podcasts that are nearly all music in a Motown kind of feel (not necessarily actual Motown but in that style) I’d love to hear about them.  Podcasts of people talking is just a waste of time, it’s much more efficient and simpler to read a blog entry than listen to someone prattle on via audio but sadly the most common type of podcast seems to be audio blogs.