Like presumably many Mac users, I use iTunes to receive and organize my podcasts – I simply like having all my media in one place, and it makes syncing to my iPod very easy. But there’s one glaring omission in iTunes’ podcast handling – you have no fine-grained control over how many episodes of a cast to keep.
Sure, you can set a global option to keep all, or remove after 7 days – but that’s global. However, those settings should be different per feed. Some casts are purely news, and can be removed after a day or two. Others, you may want to keep until you heard them, or even forever.
I’ve been searching forever for a solution that allows me to do that, and never found anything. I was actually getting close to doing something myself. My mistake was to search for an actual podcatcher application for OSX. Instead, what I wanted was a little external tool: CastAway. It allows custom retention settings (and much more) for each individual feed.
Yes, the option flood can seem a little bit daunting, and the UI might need some work – but for a $7 piece of shareware, it’s great. And, most importantly, it does the job it promises to do, and it does it well. Finally, I’ll get the podcast flood under control.