Hello, thanks for your detailed and informative post.

I'll expand a little on what I've done - I think I have a solution, but
it will take a few days of observation to check.  I am running the
squeezebox server software on my PC, though I intend to get a dedicated
HTPC which I can run it on soon.

With Yahoo Pipes, I managed to (relatively easily) return an RSS
Podcast feed that only gave the most recent podcast in the feed.  I
used the "Get RSS", "Sort" and "truncate" functions in order to do
this.

When you suggested adding this is a favourite, and I managed to do it
on the squeezebox server, I thought I'd relatively easily managed to
find a solution!  Unfortunately, if you go to add this favourite as an
alarm, you cannot do it on the squeezebox server software.  I assume
this is because it is an RSS feed, and not a direct link to an mp3 or a
stream.

So I spent some time seeing if I could extract just the mp3 url from
the RSS feed.  I couldn't get this working to return a dynamic link for
the mp3 file so the option of using Yahoo Pipes was dead.

Then, I thought of a solution similar to your long and contrived way. 
Both your long and contrived way and your "simpler solution" require a
rescan of the library after the podcast download.  This isn't realistic
for me as I will have a large media library once I'm done.

So, what I've done is:

Install Juice media centre.
Add the relevant podcasts to Juice.
Specify the file/path name to include the album name (podcast title)
but not the episode title.  The filename was defined.  So the files go
to for example,:  L:/Media/Audio/Podcasts/"Football Weekly"/lastest.mp3
with latest.mp3 being the file name (all done by specifying it in the
juice settings).

I then set the podcasts to download all titles after 3 days.  Then I
set Juice to auto-download podcasts approximately 30 minutes before my
alarm is due to go off, to make sure I have downloaded the latest
podcast before my alarm goes off.

Finally, because I didn't want to deal with dynamically changing
playlists, etc, I created an m3u playlist that only pointed at the
latest.mp3 for the particular podcast I want to play each morning.  I
then added this playlist as an alarm sound.  So far, it seems to work,
but I need a few days for the podcasts I download to refresh, so I can
see if it updates OK.

The reason I didn't want to deal with dynamically changing playlists is
because if I rescan before the podcast is downloaded, but after the
previous one is deleted, will mean that there is no file to add to the
dynamic library, so a I prefer my "fixed" option for the playlist.

It was really hard work to get it working, and really is something that
should be supported out of the box, without the need for third party
software to provide a workaround/hack.

Anyway, thanks again for your suggestions, I hope this can help someone
else, or inspire Logitech to include podcasts in the alarm function :)


-- 
jamesking
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