My buddy Rich asked me about ripping CDs the other day, which I answered, & then he followed up with a question about how to grab podcasts on Windows. Here's what I told him.

OK, download a program called Juice, which is open source, free, & works great:

http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net

Click on Windows.

On the following pg, find a location close to you & then click
Download on the right. The download should begin.

Install Juice on your machine. During the install, I would go ahead
and check Add to Startup Group so the program auto starts when you
start Windows.

Run Juice. Oon the Subscriptions tab, press the green button to add a
subscription. Yu need the URL of the podcast. KWMU's list of
podcasts, for instance, is at http://kwmu.org/Programs/podcasts.html.
See the orange POD buttons? Right-click on one that interests you,
Choose Copy Link Location, & then paste that URL into Subscriptions in
Juice.

You also need to schedule when Juice grabs your podcasts. On the
Subscriptions tab, click on the Scheduler button (the one with a clock
on it). Check the box next to Enable scheduler. I'd then click the
radio button next to Check at specific times, & then check 1 box under
that. Enter a time like this: 3:15. That would tell Juice to check each
night at 3:15 in the morning.

By default, Juice downloads all podcasts to My Documents\My Received
Podcasts. Go into there & copy the files to your Cowon portable media
player. I made a folder cleverly named "podcasts" on my media player for
the podcasts. :)

I also recommend going to File > Preferences, then Player tab, &
choosing No Player.

Since podcasts are just mp3 files, you can listen to them with the
Cowon or Quintessential Player (which I covered yesterday).

I hope that helps!

Scott

(Check out all of our posts on podcasts.)