After promising it months ago, Carl Franklin has released an initial alpha release of Pwopcatcher. I am definitely going to check it out. My current podcast subscription process has one major flaw: torrents. Pwopcatcher works in conjunction with uTorrent (my torrent downloader of choice anyway), and by doing so, can automatically download MP3s from a torrent feed.

Since I switched to FeedDemon and FeedStation, I've been much happier with my podcasting download solution because I can have podcasts downloaded automatically and maintain my subscriptions all in one place. This is why I hesitate to start using Pwopcatcher - there's only one thing I need from FeedStation to eliminate my need for another program.

Here's the deal: In FeedStation, you can set up a folder to use as the root for all podcast downloads. In uTorrent, you can set up a folder to monitor for torrent files. Any torrent file dropped in that folder will automatically get picked up and get downloaded. Sounds like a match made in heaven, right? Not quite. One of two things needs to happen: Either FeedStation (or FeedDemon) needs to allow me to override the folder that a feed will be stored in (or let me store all podcasts in one folder - no subfolders), or uTorrent needs to look for torrent files recursively.

If either of these things happened, then I could maintain all of my feeds in one place (the Newsgator family of products) and still be able to download any type of enclosure automatically, including torrents!

Until then, Pwopcatcher will probably be a great substitute for any torrent feeds.

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