Amarok 1.4.7 - KDE 3.5.8 - Kubuntu 7.10

Hi,

After using this nice tool quite successfully for my local MP3 library, I now tried to use the podcatcher feature in order to get podcasts automagically downloaded and synchronized with my Sansa View player (which, by the way, is not connected via MTP but as a mass storage device, as the libmtp version coming with Ubuntu is not able to handle that device yet).

When I simply add the feed pointing to the podcast, I can listen to its casts without problems in Amarok. When I then try to select a podcast from that list and add it to the transfer queue, connect the device and start transfer, it gives me a red "X" telling me that the device is not capable of playing this data. Is this a known bug, or do I need to set up something else for the player? Transferring "normal" MP3s works, so the format should not be a problem.

I then googled more (as this was not yet the automatic approach to get the podcasts transferred I am looking for), and found some hints that basically told me to add the feed, then select "download when available" (right mouse click on the feed + configure). I created a directory ~/podcasts/ for that purpose. However, this setting does not seem to have any effect, the podcasts are displayed on the right, but none is automatically downloaded. Even after listening with Amarok, the directory remains empty.

I also selected "add to media device transfer queue" in the same podcast settings dialog where I activated the auto-download, but again nothing happens.

Am I doing something entirely wrong here? Compared to the rest of the Amarok UI, the podcast handling and the transfer to the MP3 player does not feel very intuitive to me, so maybe I am just doing something wrong (or don't understand the function).

Please let me know how to get this working, as I don't see any other reasonable music library tool compared to Amarok, and therefore really would like to use it for this task as well.

Thanks!
Martin

MartinT wrote:When I simply add the feed pointing to the podcast, I can listen to its casts without problems in Amarok. When I then try to select a podcast from that list and add it to the transfer queue, connect the device and start transfer, it gives me a red "X" telling me that the device is not capable of playing this data. Is this a known bug, or do I need to set up something else for the player? Transferring "normal" MP3s works, so the format should not be a problem.

OK, now I found out (reading some more posts in this forum) that I can explicitly force a download by right-clicking on each pod cast. After the download completes, I can drag and drop that podcast to the device and manually start the transfer. So it seems that the "Track not playable on media device: " is caused by the track name including an URL, and not being a local file. This is probably a bug, or is it reasonable that the transfer differentiates between local files and URLs?

Now at least I have a workaround, but it's still not very handy. I am still searching for a setup to automatically transfer new podcasts to my player when it's connected.

Martin