I got a brand new Zune for Christmas. Anyway, subscribing to Podcasts on a Zune has been, well challenging. Actually almost impossible for mere mortal. I have figured out how to do this and will explain it below. Before I do that, I have to tell you a story.
I found a great Podcast courtesy of my friend Robert Lazo. It is the Stanford University Educational Corner’s Entrepreneur Podcast. It has great content. (BTW, it this content interests you, here is the link.)
I downloaded it to my Zune and after I listened to a few of the Podcasts, I told Kathleen that she needs to listen as well. She has an iPod. But she was too lazy to download them to her iPod so she kept borrowing my Zune. After not finding my Zune where I left it the other day I suggested that she just subscribe to the Podcast. She did. Boom, just like that I sent her the link and 1.3 gigs of data started downloading to her device in a very organized manor.
Not so easy with the Zune. So here is what I had to do.
Step 1. Subscribe the RSS feed manually via Internet Explorer 7.0
After I paste in the link to the RSS feed into the browser, IE 7.0 allowed me to subscribe to it. Since I am running Vista and Office 2007, the RSS feed tried to show up all over the place, the annoying sidebar and downloading in Outlook. (As if Outlook 2007 isn’t slow enough.)
Step 2. Setting up the Feed to Automatically download the content
You have to then click on the “view feed properties..” link to bring up the properties dialog. Here you have to check the box that says “Automatically Download Attached Files.”
Step 3. Finding where IE decides to put your files
Next you have to find out where IE will store the downloaded content. You can do this via selecting the “View Files” button. This will open the folder where IE stores your content. Copy the location from your Windows Explorer address bar. Here is where IE stores it on my computer: C:\Users\StephenForte\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\TemporaryInternetFiles\Enclosure\{620E20DE-0D04-449C-B2FD-B0E9B19C852B}
Step 4. Adding that Folder to Zune’s Library
Open your Zune software and select Options|Add Folder to Library from the main menu. At this point you can see what folders Zune syncs and you will have the opportunity to add the folder.
That’s it. Just four painful steps. There are also many other problems. If you clean out your temporary internet files, you lose your podcasts and have to start over with the downloads. Also once you listen to a podcast, Zune and IE have no idea that you don’t want it anymore.
Luckily there are some 3rd party tools to help with this problem, like FeedMyZune. They basically do a version of what I just did behind the scenes for you. You may want to try that.