The other day, in a discussion of PODCasting, I mentioned iPodder, an application for downloading RSS feeds with enclosures. Today version 1.0 of iPodder was released and after a little initial testing, I'm very pleased.

Getting the MP3 from the Web site to your iPod is the last mile problem of PODCasting. Previously, I've subscribed to RSS feeds that told me about new content and then manually downloaded it and placed it in iTunes, which then syncs to my iPod. iPodder solves that problem. Its a simple application that checks a list of URLs on a scheduled basis and downloads and stores any MP3 (or ACC) files it finds on your computer. On the Mac, at least, it puts them right in iTunes in a place list named after the feed title. Very convenient.

iPodder is written in Python. The application is available for Mac and Windows platforms right now (Linux coming soon?) and despite the name, works with Windows Media Player as well as iTunes (although I've only tried it on the Mac with iTunes). BitTorrent support is built in, which makes it an important component in PODCasting for those of us with limited bandwidth budgets. On the Mac, make sure you open your account preferences and set iPodder to start automatically. That way, the scheduler will be able to run.