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I don’t normally cover iPhone tips on this site, but I thought I’d share one with you as it relates to podcasts. Until I got my 2G iPhone, I listened to a lot of music on my iPod. Here in Portland, I nearly always take the bus, Max, ride my bike, or walk to my destination, so the iPod and iPhone make good companions. Over the last couple of years, I’ve started listening to a lot of podcasts. One of my favorites is NPR’s Planet Money, which comes out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and is typically 15-30 minutes in length.
The problem with this podcast is that the file size is usually more than 10MB, which means I can’t download it on my iPhone over the 3G network. This has never made any sense to me, especially since I can stream a baseball game for 3 hours, which certainly uses more than 10MB of bandwidth. Regardless, Apple has not budged on this rule, so you have to wait until you’re back in a WiFi zone before you can download these larger podcasts.
Luckily, there’s a solution that should work for most people: stream it, don’t download it. Here’s how:
- Search the iTunes Store on the iPhone or navigate to your favorite podcast.
- Click on the podcast group to look at the list of available episodes.
- Instead of clicking on the “FREE” button to download the podcast, click on the title of the episode you want to hear. This will cause the iPhone to begin streaming the podcast, even if it’s over 10MB! In fact, this will work with 100MB+ video podcasts, too.
Of course, there are some negatives associated with this method:
- You cannot leave the media player window that opens to stream your podcast and later return to it. This means that you cannot listen to an audio podcast in the background while doing other tasks on the iPhone (of course, if your goal is to view a video podcast, this isn’t a problem at all).
- The podcast will not be saved on your iPhone to be played later. If your goal is to download several podcasts before you get on a plane, that won’t work here.
- Downloading many megabytes of data can really wear down your battery (especially video podcasts).
One final note is that, although I describe this process as “streaming” the podcast, that’s not really true. A real stream only buffers 10-30 seconds of audio at a time, meaning the stream is constantly talking to the server to get more of the data. In this case, your iPhone is downloading the entire file and simultaneously playing it back. This is often a positive, though, because if you download the entire file before you lose cell coverage, you’ll still be able to listen to the entire podcast. Your phone will only need to communicate over 3G for as long as is necessary to download the file, too. Assuming that’s less time than the length of the podcast, you’ll be able to save some battery life.
I hope this iPhone tip worked for you. If you have any other suggestions (or if you’d like to see more iPhone tips), let me know in the comments.
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As a fellow iPhone owning commuter, I appreciate the tip. I often get stymied by the download limit, it’s good to know there is a workaround.