Hi,

When I listen to podcasts, it is generally when I am on the bus, walking around, at work etc. with my ipod or with amarok in the house whilst working, tidying up etc.

Quite often, I will listen to half or so of a podcast before I need to stop it or skip to music because I'm required to concentrate more. The ipod has a really nice feature in that it shows you which podcasts you've listened to and it remembers where you listened up to last time a podcast was played. This lets you, for example: listen to podcast A, switch to listening to podcast B, switch to listening to music and then you can resume listening to A and B where you left of last time when you feel like it.

I would like amarok to have a similar feature. When you are listening to a podcast and you stop/skip the track, amarok could remember where you have listened up to. When you play the podcast again, it could resume playback from where you left of. Perhaps you could have a dialog asking "You have previously played the first X minutes of this podcast without finishing. Would you like to resume from there or start again?", or just have this option in the preferences somewhere.

Even better, you could allow syncing of this data between the ipod and amarok. For instance, I could listen to 30 minutes of podcast A, sync with my ipod and then my ipod would resume playback of A 30 minutes in. This could also work in reverse, so you could come home listening to a podcast, sync, and then amarok could resume playback from where you left of. I frequently arrive home listening to a podcast, turn off my ipod and then don't bother hearing the rest because I forget, so this would be a nice feature.

In the podcast list, you would then have three status icons/colours: not listened to, listened to, partially listened to (i.e. did not play until the end was reached).This would be a nice way of looking at your podcasts if you must compulsively listen to all of them.

By the way, I personally find the blue icon (all listened to) and red icon (not all listened to) used for the podcasts hard to tell apart because they look so similar. Just having a difference in colour does not draw my eye. The ipod uses no icon or a blue icon and this makes it quite obvious to me when scanning. I'm not sure what would look better in amarok. Maybe a big star for new podcasts and a dot for nothing. Or red broadcasting beacon for new podcasts and a grey non-broadcasting beacon for no new podcasts.

Perhaps you could use a numbering system like akregator and kmail use for new mail/posts where the number shows how many new podcasts there are. The tree icon could be the podcast artwork or just something generic then. I like this idea best as podcasts updates are similar to mail/posts/newsgroups so it uses the same consistent presentation.

Any, just some ideas I thought I would share.

Thanks for the great software!

resuming within tracks is great for podcasts, it's the only thing keeping me using itunes.