iTunes adds podcasts

As rumored, iTunes 4.9 dropped today, with podcasts in tow. I’m not a podcast person (yet), because I just haven’t had the time to devote to listening. The integrated podcast support in iTunes is very easy. They’ve added a whole section to the music store for finding podcasts, and you can also subscribe to any podcast you know the URL for. In the Podcasts part of iTunes, you see one podcast per line. What about the multiple items that can appear in a podcast? They’ve added a new widget for selecting between the items in a podcast.

On the one hand, podcast subscriptions is an RSS thing that you’d think belongs in your feed reader. On the other hand, podcasts generally need to hook up with your music player so that they can be conveniently downloaded to your portable player (and there’s a 70% chance that’s an iPod). Since both types of programs have a hand in this, I think the podcast support in iTunes is a logical step, and it looks nicely done.