Cast Away - 2.9.3

This app is great. You can have it discard old podcasts and make sure you only have the lastest ones. It can have it prevent iTune from expiring your unlistened to subscriptions and make sure you have the latest ones. It's fully customizable.

Once you set it up, you can walk away and know that when you sync your iPod or want listen to the latest podcast it will be there for you, and you don't have to worry about filling up your hard disk or iPod. It will remove them according to your rules. Just set it up and forget it.

You can even have it play the latest podcast automatically as it arrives, or use it to wake you up in the morning.

Also, the developer is very responsive and open to improvements.

Give it a try. You'll be glad you did.

Disclosure: I beta tested this version, but am not commercially or otherwise associated with it.

Since the update of iTunes 7 the program has stopped working and is now giving a bunch of scrip errors. Please update for newest version.

This is a great product. Automate your podcasts and/or recordings from Radioshark and Audio Hijack. Once you set it up, you can walk away and have a complete up-to-date set of podcasts and have Cast Away make sure you only keep the ones you want, and prevent your iPod and iTunes from bloat.

Well worth the price. The developer is very responsive to recommendations and fixes.

I find the ability to manage podcasts critical and can't believe that Apple left it out of iTunes. Without Cast Away my podcast library would quickly balloon to many gigabytes (especially with video podcasts.) I find that the app has allowed me to subscribe to many more feeds than I'd otherwise have the time to manage manually.

Cast Away's new user interface solves all of the concerns listed by some other reviewers below and the app still gives you the power to make more advanced settings if you're a cron-oholic through the 'old' interface if you prefer that.

If you're trying to manage your podcast/video podcast subscriptions this is your app.

I've been using Cast Away for a bit over a week and am quite pleased with the functionality and what I have seen so far. I think iTunes preferences for removing podcasts are somewhat underpowered and I've been looking for a more sophisticated way of determining which podcasts to remove. Cast Away has the features I've been looking for, providing fine grain control over which podcasts are removed. While iTunes lets you create settings that apply to *all* the podcasts, Cast Away lets you create individual settings for each podcast. You can remove podcasts by age or cumulative size.. Since some
podcasts (like "Inside Mac Radio") have weekly hour long podcasts and short daily ones, Cast Away lets you set up different policies for the long and short podcasts.

The new interface creates a much more intuitive way of setting up your preferences.. so if you struggled with the complexity of the spreadsheet interface in an earlier version, you should take another look.