Cast Away

Cast Away

cost: shareware, $7

“Podcast removal scheduler and auto-player for iTunes. Cast Away fills a gap left in iTunes’ implementation of Podcasts.”

I listen to a lot of podcasts, mostly video podcasts on a regular basis. And while iTunes is a great for music, the podcast feature came later in it’s evolution, and the interface shows. I found it really annoying that I wasn’t able to have better control over when various podcast episodes would expire, marked as new/listened, and most importantly, when old podcasts would be deleted.

That’s when I found Cast Away. It adds all those features and many more. In fact, the level of control it provides can be overwhelming at first. But I found the documentation good, and the support from the developer excellent. Now I use Cast Away regularly to clear out old podcasts, keep the new ones ready, and best, it defeats the dreaded “You haven’t listened to this in a while so iTunes stopped updating it” problem.