[iTunes] scheduling podcasts

[Dale Shera]

On May 9, 2008, at 8:39 AM, Kirk McElhearn wrote:

> Are you saying that you leave your computer on all night, when  
> you're not using it? What a waste of electricity...

If you turn your monitor off, and if you have your computer configured  
to spin the hard drives down after x amount of minutes of non-use, you  
aren't wasting all that much electricity. You're, essentially, only  
spinning the computer's fans.

As for downloading podcasts on a schedule, iTunes itself doesn't offer  
that functionality. But, there are third party tools to accommodate  
the task. I'm not much of an Applescript writer myself. But, I  
suspected that an Applescript could be written to do this type of  
activity on a Mac. In fact, <http://dougscripts.com/itunes> might  
already have such a script. I didn't find it immediately. So, I did a  
Google search hoping to find something on the topic. Sure enough, I  
found this:

<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061219003616685>

> The solution is a simple iTunes AppleScript:
> tell application "iTunes" to updateAllPodcasts
> You can use iCal, or any other scheduling app you like, to run it  
> when it makes the most sense for you. I use cron with the following  
> entry:
> 00 5,17 * * * osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to  
> updateAllPodcasts'


Granted, Becca isn't using a Mac. So, these instructions wouldn't help  
her...

But, on Windows, I found this solution after a Google search:

How to schedule iTunes to download Podcasts on Windows:
<http://mutable.net/blog/archive/2006/11/30/how-to-schedule-itunes-to-download-podcasts-on-windows.aspx 
 >

So, the solutions aren't necessarily simple--nor are they as elegant  
as they would be when integrated into iTunes, yet. But, you can  
accomplish this task without too much difficulty.

Dale