BrainWyrms

Juice 2.2, an open source rss media aggregator, seems to work fairly well. However, it is open source… which in my experience, typically means that the user interface is a bit quirky. Wonky. Strange. Obtuse.  It is kind of like the difference between an actress and your sister. Both are pretty, but one isn’t quite as polished.

Sorry, no offense to your sister.

The Criteria:

• Ignore non-enclosure posts
• Configure number of stored items per feed
• Configure download location
• Configurable trash collection system
• Automatic ID3 editing
• Configure number of feeds scanned during sync
• Configure number of items downloading at one time
• Ability to set an upper limit on bandwith being used
• Import OPML
• Export OPML

Running through my checklist of requirements for a podcatcher, I noticed that I have two items that essentially cover the same idea. I’m removing “configure number of stored items per feed” as redundant when “configurable trash collection system” covers it and more.

And back to the subject at hand, which today is Juice. Juice does a fine job, without being outstanding. Running down the list, Juice does just fine at grabbing podcasts, both generic audio only podcasts and those annoyingly new-fangled video podcasts, all while ignoring any obnoxious text that may have crept into the feed.

Not only can I select the location of my downloaded podcasts, but Juice has an option to stop downloading before the hard drive fills up. The initial default setting is for 1024MB, which is hopefully enough to allow Windows to do things like min/max windows and shutdown. Unfortunately, Juice does not seem to offer any sort of options regarding the way that files are saved. For instance, if I wanted to just have all the podcasts together in a single directory location… I’d be out of luck. So it’s a good thing that I don’t want that.

On the trash collection side of things, Juice has two ways of dealing with the problem. It allows me to (optionally) set a day-timer. The default is to 14 days, so anything older than 14 days will get deleted. Juice also has a “Cleanup” tab where I can select entries to delete. I really wish it had automatic options for how many podcasts to keep and a maximum feed file size setting.

Juice has no automatic ID3 tag editing capabilities. Until the day when podcasters come to universally recognize that a podcast is a podcast, I need my podcatcher to be smart for them… and automatically correct the genre to “podcast.” This is where Juice gets a FAIL.

While I would still like to see the ability to put a cap on how much of my bandwidth Juice is hogging while downloading all that goodness, the ease with which I can set exactly how many feeds to scan and how many files to download compensates nicely. My subscription list includes a good mixture of large and small files sizes coming from hosts with both fast and slow connection rates, so sometimes I want to be able to change the max DLs on the fly, to get around a stinker. I’ll have to do some further playing around with Juice to see if that actually works or not.

The OPML import functionality it quick and easy. The export is snappy… although it has a bit of FAIL floating after it. See, Juice used to be iPodder. And the OPML export file is still named “ipodder-subscriptions.opml”. Really, just a niggling complaint. Both the import and export functions are right off of the file menu and import even has its own keyboard shortcut!

So to tally up: 3 points for each criteria met. 1 point for a partial, and none for a strike.

1. Ignore non-enclosure posts: 3
2. Configure download location: 3
3. Configurable trash collection system: 1
4. Automatic ID3 editing: 0
5. Configure number of feeds scanned during sync: 3
6. Configure number of items downloading at one time: 3
7. Ability to set an upper limit on bandwith being used: 0
8. Import OPML: 3
9. Export OPML: 3

Total: 19/27 or 70% or C-
Which is technically a passing grade, depending on how “exclusive” your school was. Good, but I’m hoping to find something a little better.

Next I’m going to try out FeedReader 3.13, which will hopefully do a little better.

update: I should have noticed and noted that Juice seems to be a dead project with what appears to be the final updates made in 2005. I think that’s a shame and I wonder at how awesome Juice could be now if the developers had stuck with it.