I was talking to Lenn the other night about wanting to transfer Podcasts directly to my Pocket PC’s storage card. iPieter has a great tutorial on how to use a Pocket PC in general to do this, but it comes up very lacking for most who have PPCs with small RAM footprints, escpecially when Curry et all are spinning out 40M+ Podcasts.

I saw Scoble’s post today referring to Jake Ludington’s WMA Pocasting instructions and decided to beat a path to completion of my goal – using iPodder to transfer the downloaded files directly to my PPCs storage card.

Two issues stand in my way of being 100% satisfied:
1) The 1.0 release of iPodder for Windows, while being a great improvement to previous versions since a UI now exists, still won’t allow me to change the download directory. I tried adding a feeds.txt with a new file path, as iPieter’s original tutorial suggests. No dice. I may be able to get around this one shortly if the iPodder development team fixes this.
2) ActiveSync is a PITA in that it refuses to natively sync to Storage Cards (Why Robert and Lenn, why??) I found an app that costs $5.95 called MightySync; however, it does not appear to allow for automated syncing. From all indications, it is great for syncing to Storage Cards, but needs to have the transfer manually kicked off.

So, I figured I’d head down the dangerous road of registry hacks. I hacked my PPC registry using PHM RegEdit (freeware) to point all instances of “\MyDocuments” to be “\Storage Card\My Documents”, deleted the partnership with my PC, recreated it, and my PC’s registry indicates that the sync folder on the PPC side is “\Storage Card\My Documents”.

I am now in a state where I can do one way syncing through Active Sync of files on my Desktop to my PPC’s storage card. Yep, you heard it here first, I am using ActiveSync to copy files straight to my Storage Card (YEAH!)

WAIT!! I said one way sync, remember… So, even though I can drop a file into my PPC synced files folder on my PC and have it go to my PPC’s Storage Card, I can’t get ActiveSync to remove the file from my Storage Card when I remove the file from my PPC synced files folder on my PC. In addition, ActiveSync incorrectly keeps track of the synchronized state of files.

When will I be satisifed? I’ll be 75% satisfied when iPodder for Windows will allow me to change the download path like previous versions. Then, I will at least be able to have ActiveSync transfer things over automatically.

I’ll be 100% satisified when Microsoft’s Mobile Solutions team chooses to FINALLY support syncing of files to Storage Cards. If no other technology made this necessary for their roadmap, this one does. I can’t effectivley use my PPC to listen to Podcasts unless they are on my beefy storage card. Please, make it so that I can do this automatically and not have to copy things back and forth manually.

I can either manually sync my non audio files and (kind of) automatically sync Podcasts, OR I can automatically sync my files and manually sync my Podcasts. I SHOULD be able to automatically sync both (AND to a storage card!!!) Robert and Lenn, who do I need to bug??