Apple blows at supporting easy Podcast syncing between your desktop and your iPhone. In order to sync you need to perform a physical sync via USB — not much help when you’re on the go and want easy access to your latest podcast subscriptions (I certainly don’t perform a sync on a daily basis, nor do I want to).
To get around this I set up a cron job on my computer to sync with my DropBox (www.dropbox.com) folder every hour. You can do the same by following what I’ve done below — tweak to your heart’s content if you have alternate goals in mind.
- DL and install Dropbox on your iPhone and computer (https://www.dropbox.com/home)
- Create a Podcasts folder in your Dropbox folder
- Create a bash script to automatically sync your iTunes podcast folder with your Dropbox/Podcasts folder
This will do a search in your iTunes/Podcasts directory, limiting the results to only files under 40mb (I don’t want any 200mb .mp4s) and then create a symlink to the podcast in your Dropbox/Podcasts folder.
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set the script to executable with chmod
#!bash chmod 755 syncPodcasts.sh
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set your user cron to execute this file
#!bash crontab -e
#!bash 0 * * * * /Users/username/bin/syncPodcasts.sh
Again, replace ‘username’ with your own or otherwise alter the path to point to your script. Once you save the file (with a “:wq” if you’re using vim), you should be told that cron has been updated. From now on, your syncPodcasts.sh script should be executed every hour on the hour (that your computer is turned on and awake for). Check out the cron documentation if you want to change the frequency at which it’s run but aren’t familiar with the expected format.
Access your podcasts through your phone by opening up your Dropbox app — hopefully you have 3g access when you do this part as Dropbox will need it for syncing.
At this point you should be good to go but let me know if you have any problems.