iTunes 4.9 and Podcasting...

Ok, so I'm sure everyone else has there own opinions on podcasting in general, and podcasting tools, and it's no surprise I'm also one of them...

Anyway, I eagerly downloaded the new iTunes and iPod updates and gave this beast a whirl - WOW - ok, its nice. VERY nice. The interface looks clean, but...

1. How the hell do I add a new podcast? Why, simply drag the URL from a browser to the app. Thats all well and good, but it would also be nice to have a simple "add a URL" entry box...
2. How do I set a proxy? Ok, so we have fibre in the office capable of getting a nice 100kb/s transfers, the only problem is that when I do that no one else has ANY bandwidth, and Zach the admin nazi gets annoyed. For this reason I have my self a rate limited squid proxy, iTunes - how the hell do I use this? (After some initial annoyance, I set the proxy in Internet Explorer and bingo - iTunes will use this setting/proxy).
3. There doesn't seem to be any options for automatic ID3 rewriting, or automated classification of a "podcast", problem due to the fact that there completely separate in the user interface - in both iTunes and the iPod. In fact, there so separate that my live bookmarks don't show them up, even thou the genres match.
4. That leads me to this pet hate, the iPod has a new "podcasts" menu which list each different show, allowing me to drill down to each episode; but unlike the normal song/artist/album browser, theres no "all" option. So I can't just say "give me a playlist of all podcasts, at random". This could be a bit annoying...

All in all its looking nice, but iTunes doesn't exactly have the upgrade cycle of an open source app, so I don't think I'll be seeing any of these pet peeves go away anytime soon, nor do I know of any valid email address to submit these problems to ( or if anyone would answer if I did).

Still, my hat goes off to Apple for what they've given, it'll make getting podfolk into podcasting so much easier.

Update: Ryan Ozawa has started an iTunes Podcasting Wiki page to track its quirks...