Auto-download only newly released podcasts from feed
I'd love to see an option to auto-download only the podcasts that are new to the feed - that is, those released after a certain date, such as the subscription date. The current auto-download feature assumes that "new" is anything on the feed list I haven't played, which is too indiscriminate. This would be great for podcasts where you want to hear everything current while retaining the ability to browse the back catalog and pick and choose what you want to manually download from it. As it stands you have to either auto-download everything displayed or put up with manually downloading the new items.
Thanks guys.
If you flag all the existing items as old, when new items are published, they will be marked as new and downloaded.
Am I misunderstanding what you are trying to do?
I think I'm in the same boat here. I just subscribed to a new-to-me weekly podcast. My auto-download downloaded the most current episode (57). I would like to browse the feed, and manually pick and choose previous episodes to download and listen to, but I have not found a way to do this within DoggCatcher.
Is there a procedure to browse a currently subscribed podcast in order to pick and choose previous episodes?
You can just press on the older items on the screen for that feed and they will be downloaded. If you need to go further back into the history of item than is displayed, you can increase the max items feed option.
I think I'm thinking kinda the same thing as fryguy and jp. After typing it out I realize it's a bit long but I was thinking this might be useful to many others so I was trying to explain why the subtle change might make sense in addition to the already flexible options DC gives us:
Since purchasing Doggcatcher (which is simply the best feedcacther I've found and well worth the price) I immediately suscribed to 6 feeds that I'd already subscribed to on my old Blackberry. Downloaded various amounts of episodes in each feed after installing DC. Say feed1 has 3 downloads, feed2 has 7, feed3 has 1, feed4 has 20, etc. I also go back and download other older episodes from each feed along with newly published ones so the number of episodes I keep per feed is always changing. This will also come up any time I suscribe to a new feed and want to listen to older episodes instead of just moving forward from the time I suscribe to it. I can't set a specific number even individually that I want to auto download for each podcast so instead of being able to use autodownload at all for any feeds I instead have to rely on notifications and then select the podcasts manually for the queue. Hehehe, show's how spoiled we've gotten. :-) DC makes doing that very easy so it's not like it's a big issue or anything but it would be nice to just get the new episodes automatically and not have to set a number of episodes I have to keep either globally or individually since DC does have an auto download feature.
Other catchers I tried did not give you the flexibility on auto downloads that DC does but the one option that seemed to be common to many of them was to auto download only teh latest episode published since the last feed check. Or episodeS if more than 1 was published since last feed update.
So I guess the option would be to auto download anything published since the last feed update...? A Global option and for each feed individually like the other feed options...?
Along those lines, would be nice to have the feeds mark all items already there when you first subscribe to them as DONE so you could go back and select the ones you want to listen to by marking them as NEW. Once you've subscribed anything published on the feed since then is marked as NEW as it does now of course. That way the Autodownload option could simply be to "Autodownload anything marked as NEW". It will then pick up new episodes automatically and older ones that you specify as NEW so you don't have to pull down 200 episodes at once if the feed offers that many. But maybe also an option on the feed after you've subscribed to "Mark all items as 'NEW'" or "Mark all items as 'DONE'". Sort of a "Select ALL" "Select None" tool. Some of my feeds have many older episodes available and some I've listened to already. When freshly subscribing to a feed marking older episodes as DONE and having the Autodownload set to download items marked as "NEW" takes care of that. And still giving the ability to mark all as DONE or NEW would fill all needs on how people want to manage them I think.
I hope that makes sense. In short when you subscribe to a feed any episodes already published when you subscribe are marked as DONE. Items published after that are marked as NEW. So the option could be "Auto Download all items marked as NEW". You can then either go back and mark individual episodes as NEW and they would be auto dowloaded as well as getting all the newly published episodes automatically. And you have the option on a feed to "Mark all episodes as NEW" to allow someone to still be able to download all older episodes at once by selecting "Mark all episodes as NEW".
Marking them as NEW when you subscribe does make total sense for feeds with smaller lists of episodes but for feeds that give you many episodes I think it would increase the flexibility of the Auto Downloads and Episode Tracking greatly. Especially for new DC users when subscribing to a feed they've already subscribed to with another app.
Also feel just a little silly offering suggestions on such an already powerful tool. :-) I was very meticulous about checking other apps when I got a new smartphone. I knew what I wanted and was just blown away with the flexibility DC gives you. This is just a wish because I'm already totally happy with what I paid for.
I apologize ahead of time because I think I must be missing something here. Let me explain what I think I'm reading, let me know if I'm right.
You would like to manually select some older episodes to download and to also to have auto-download download anything that becomes new to the feed as the feed is updated in the future?
What should be happening when you add a feed is that all the items get flagged as done except the most recent (or maybe two, I forget). If auto-downloads is set to ten for example, you could go and manually download 5 older episodes and then auto-download would download then new 4 episodes that were published.
Setting the auto-downloads to something high should have the same effect as "Autodownload anything marked as NEW".
I know that the feed configuration is pretty tricky as it is, I wish I could make it easier to understand. It's tough to get all the various configurability in place while at the same time make it reasonable to figure out.
I'm guessing that I'm still missing something that you want to do in your workflow though. If there is, please let me know.
Thanks for posting.
In fact I owe you one Eric. :-) I just added a new feed that I hadn't added before and it acts exactly like I was trying to describe for that part, the marking all as DONE when newly subscribing. All the feeds except the latest one were marked as DONE. I think I was confused on that because I was dealing with feeds I had already listened to on my old Blackberry before I was able to purchase your app, was marking and un-marking them as I added them the first night I bought it. And so then with this new feed I just added, having the Auto-download set to a number other than zero allowed it to auto download the newest episode, just as you described. Really sorry to have wasted your time with that part.
What I was really getting at in my long-winded explanation is having the ability to only auto-download episodes published since the last feed update, only auto download those items but still be able to mark others as NEW but not have them auto download. Realizing that the frequency of feed updates setting and the ability to only download when plugged in or on wifi could pose situations where an item is published but the feed is updated before it is auto downloaded... Maybe it would be better to call it "only auto download items PUBLISHED since this individual feed last auto downloaded an episode".
For feeds that have a lot of episodes I like to go back and mark older episodes as NEW but not yet download them to save space on my sd card. I then go back at various times and pull down older episodes that I'd marked earlier. The number of episodes I want downloaded per feed is always changing, the number that I want for each individual feed. For example, there's a feed I just subscribed to that has 200 older episodes available. I want it to keep downloading the current episodes as they are published but still be able to go back and mark older episodes as NEW but download them manually when I choose. Say I have 7 items on it downloaded and so I set the number to 8 so it auto downloads the latest episode. Then I listen to 2 and then download 3 items manually to listen to later. Now it won't auto-download the latest episode because I have 9 downloaded and I've set it to 8. I would have to continuously adjust that number for each feed in order to continue to auto download the newest episodes.
Having to set a number and go by that doesn't work as of course it will then go back and auto-download anything marked as new up to the number I've set. Which it should of course, that's exactly how it's designed to work. :-) But using it the way I do I have to just turn off the auto download feature and pull them down manually when I notice new episodes are ready. Hehehee, "download manually", I click once on each episode, big deal. :-) Having the ability to set the number of episodes either globally or for each feed is very cool. But the way I use it having to set the number of episodes prohibits me from using the auto download.
But as you say I'm sure it must be very difficult to pack in all the functionality that you do and yet make it easy enough to understand and configure. And I also realize that what I've described is not very easy to incorporate alongside the already powerful current options DC has for auto downloads. I just appreciate that you take the time to listen to your users. In the end whether or not it's practical to incorporate this specific feature doesn't change my opinion one bit on how much I love this application! I tried about 5 I guess in total, read about many others.
Sorry once again so long Eric. I hope I made more sense this time, it's hard to describe such a subtle difference. And seriously, thank you just for hosting this forum and taking the time to listen. It blows me away that you actively solicit suggestions from your users. I guess that's part of why it's become the hands down choice for podcast catchers/players. Keep up the outstanding work!