A podcast is either a video or audio content distributed through the internet. Many radio stations often distribute their content through podcasts so that even if you miss to listen the original broadcast over the AM or FM frequency, you can go online and access the episode through the podcast. The largest public radio network in US – NPR, makes available the podcasts of its various shows like Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, Car Talk etc. Although you can download the podcast using your web browser as an MP3 file, but a better option is gPodder. It is a free application for Linux, Mac and Windows which allows you to manage and download the latest podcasts from various sources.
You can get gPodder from the sourceForge website. But it also requires you to install Python and PyGTK before you can run it. After you have installed all these three software on your PC, you can run gPodder from its desktop shortcut. It asks you to set a download directory where the podcast downloads shall be placed. It then asks you to add podcast sources – you can choose from one the popular podcasts already listed in gPodder or you can copy/paste the URL of a podcast you know about.
Once you have subscribed or added to a podcast in gPodder, it will seek for newer available episodes. In a few seconds, it shows you the episodes that you can download. You can select to download all of them, or choose only the ones that you are really interested in. Clicking on the Download button shall start the download process.
The download progress can be seen under the Progress tab. Once the download is finished, you can play it by right-clicking on it and selecting Play. You can also open the download directory and double-click on the downloaded files to play them in your favorite media player.
Conclusion: If you often visit a website for checking for new episodes of a podcast, then you can instead use the gPodder podcast manager. It can automatically detect the new episodes for a podcast and download them automatically. It supports both the video and audio podcasts.
You can download gPodder from http://gpodder.org/.