I have looked at several Podcast retrieving applications. However, none I have found so far do anything good with the Podcast information.

Almost every podcast contains tags that could be populated into metadata tags, it would seem, fairly easily. Having a podcast grabber that did so would certainly simplify using them on my iPod.

Is there one out there that does this?

Thanks!

The tags are generally embedded in the file, and podcast managers don't change them. You could try a program like EasyTAG to add tags...

Actually, that's not entirely accurate.

Yes, there are tags embedded in the file, but they aren't always standardized. However, the XML file that your podcast aggregator looks at contains lots of information about the title, "album", description, etc. A good podcast aggregator really should strip the tags IN the file, then repopulate it with that information.

That way ALL of the episodes from a given podcast have the same "Album" tag, so that an iPod will accurately sort them.

You know, as soon as I posted the question I ran across hpodder, a little command-line beauty that reportedly does exactly what I'm looking for. Its information says it uses the information in the podcast's xml file to populate the ID3 tags. I'm trying it now. We'll see...

Thanks!

Stephen

hmm, no-go on hpodder. It does NOT, apparently, populate the ID3 tags from the XML file, though it says it does. I may have to dl the source and see if I can find the problem.

(Said as though I have more than a basic knowledge of programming, or any knowledge at all about Haskell.)

If the functionality was already written, then it's just a matter of finding a bug. Perhaps this weekend.

In the meantime, I'll have to manually set my podcast tags or deal with the shuffled deck of cards that is my podcast list on my iPod.

By the way, if anyone has an answer to my original question - where I can find a program that already does this - I'd love to hear from you!

Stephen