Abandoning Juice Receiver – At least for now

I have absolutely LOVED using Juice Receiver along with PodNova and iTunes to manage my podcast subscriptions the past several years. Unfortunately, the developers of Juice Receiver appear to have discontinued updates, and the available version (2.2) for Macintosh OS X runs VERRRYYYY slowly and sometimes (at least for me) doesn’t run at all. I usually run Juice Receiver every week or so to update my podcast channel subscriptions, and have noticed for several months that Juice runs very slow. (I keep my primary iTunes library on an external hard drive, so this updating process requires a bit more inconvenience because of this.) For some reason this evening, however, Juice will not run an update. It launches fine, but locks up when I click the update button. My computer shows that Python maxes out the CPU cycles on my MacBook, and I really can’t do anything until I force quit the application. The graphic below shows my CPU usage history (with iStat) just after I force quit Juice Receiver. You can see the cycles were just maxed out before this screenshot was captured with Skitch:

Since I maintain my podcast channels on PodNova and PodNova permits the downloading of an OPML file of podcast subscriptions, I decided to download the OPML and then import the podcast channels included in it directly into iTunes. Initially I had trouble with this because PodNova wanted to append the extention “.xml” to the OPML file, and iTunes didn’t like that. When I chose FILE – IMPORT within iTunes, I could select the opml.xml file created by PodNova, but iTunes wouldn’t import anything.

To troubleshoot this, I subscribed to a couple podcasts via the podcast directory in iTunes, and then exported that OPML file from iTunes to the desktop to see if I could identify a difference between the OPML file syntax which iTunes likes versus the OPML file syntax of PodNova using TextWrangler. Fortunately, I didn’t have to even look “inside” the OPML file and make any changes– the difference was the file extension! iTunes apparently requires OPML files have the extension “.opml” to import them as podcast channels. Once I changed the extension, whoa-la! All 44 channels directly imported into iTunes!

It is entirely possible I have a misconfiguration or a corrupt file on my system which is causing Juice Receiver to malfunction on my Macbook running OS 10.5.2. I have actually ordered a new laptop hard drive and plan to soon reinstall my OS and all my applications— At that time I’ll give Juice Receiver another try. For now, however, it looks like I’ll have to settle for using iTunes to manage my podcast channel subscriptions. The main feature of Juice Receiver I’ll miss is the “clean up” feature, which I detailed in my January video podcast “Cleaning Up Downloaded Podcasts with Juice Receiver.”

Is anyone else continuing to use Juice Receiver on a Macintosh computer with iTunes, running the latest operating system? I’m hopeful I’ll be able to return to Juice Receiver at some point in the not too distant future.

Technorati Tags:
podnova, juice, itunes, podcast, subscribe

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