I listen to lots of podcasts, both technical and for entertainment. The problem I have had for a long time is that I need software that will download episodes from a specified list of podcasts and, as I keep a large number of podcasts on my computer then synchronise a subset to a mobile device. Although there are options all seemed unsatisfactory somehow I object to running the large memory foot print of a program like iTunes when I really only need to download once a week. Also I wanted to be able to control which episodes were synchronised, 3 of this podcast, all of another, and none of the software I tried seemed to be able to support that level of configuration.

So the obvious solution, to me, was to write something that would do the job. It also give me an opportunity to collaborate with Andrew on software which is fun, and I learn things and it gets written faster. It also gave us an opportunity to use Mercurial as hosted by Bitbucket while collaborating. We were both keen to explore working on a open source project.

Around Christmas we started working on utilities to handle synchronisation. This month we have opened to PodcastUtilities project to everyone. PodcastUtilities are utilities that will provide portable, configurable,  lightweight, scriptable utilities to download and synchronise podcasts. The initial codebase handles synchronisation.