Wednesday, November 09, 2005

DSC Problem Resolution: From Doppler to iPodder On a lark, I dropped Adam Curry an email in the hopes that I could get to the bottom of my problem with his podcast, the Daily Source Code.  Essentially, the driver for my Dell MP3 player would complain about the file being corrupt in some way.  This was made more interesting by the fact that I could still play the MP3 files.  Well, as our email thread grew, Adam suggested that I take a look at my "podcatcher."  For those of you who do not know, a podcatcher is an application that is set to take RSS feeds and parse out the enclosures contained within them.  In this case, a podcatcher is supposed to download the MP3 podcast files enclosed within a RSS feed.  An in-depth article can be found in Wikipedia on podcasting and podcatching.  For those all too unfamiliar with all of these terms, a simple way to think of this is what iTunes has recently begun to do for podcasting--it includes a section to setup and retrieve podcasts.  In the beginning, there were two podcatchers I tried--Doppler and iPodder.  I did not like iPodder, as I found its interface to leave much to be desired and it initially did not include a way to "clean up" the downloaded podcasts after a specified interval.  Doppler had all these features, so I made it my podcatcher of choice.  Given my geeky nature, though, I had been using the latest beta of Doppler--Doppler Build 2.9.2041.17630--since August.  I was not having any problems at the time, and all seemed to be in order.  In retrospect--and based on my discovery yesterday--this build of Doppler has some serious problem.  On files that I force it to retrieve--after it initially downloaded and cleaned these files up--some type of corruption occurs.  What causes the corruption is, though, is the mystery.  I can only theorize that this version of Doppler is righting something to the file that the driver does not like.  I presume that if I had more time, I could probably use Filemon to determine what exactly is happening to create this problem.  I, of course, don't have that much free time on my hands.  I did at least report this problem--what I consider to be a potentially dangerous bug--on the Beta Bug forum.  I know that the developer of Doppler has little free time these days, so who knows when the problem may be fixed.  Instead, my solution was to return to iPodder.  I downloaded and installed it yesterday, and it is nice to see that a lot of improvements have been made in the product.  Its interface is similar to Doppler in some regards, and it has incorporated a very nice directory cleanup feature.  The best part, though, is that the same files I had problems with using Doppler were retrieved and then synced to my Dell without a problem whatsoever.  It never ceases to amaze me how some of the stranger technical problems can have the simplest of resolutions.  So, my thanks to Adam for helping me get this problem fixed and postponing my purchase of iPod pr0n.  4:37:10 PM    comment []  trackback []