Even though I work as an Information Systems professional, I have never been an early adopter of new technology as a consumer. I'm happy to let the geekier people work their way through the high prices and growing pains of the latest new toys. Then when something is here to stay, I may eventually take it up knowing that both product and support structure will be robust. For example, I didn't get my first mobile phone until 2000, and then only because it was subsidized by my employer. Now, I can hardly remember what life was like before we all had them.
Similarly I greeted the gift of an iPod Touch from some colleagues five years ago with a bit of bemusement. I wasn't quite sure what it did, much less what I might use it for. But after a year or so I realized I could use it to listen to radio programs I wanted when I was driving. And I was off.
Now I'm a devoted user, above all for listening to Podcasts. I started with Fresh Air. Since then I've added:
and others.
Anyway, what makes it all work is the iTunes software which I have loaded on my Windows7 machine. It took some getting used to, but eventually I became reasonably adept at getting it to download and organize my podcasts. And I've generally taken the software updates more or less immediately when I'm notified of them. So, I didn't think anything of it when the Apple software updater notified me of a new version of iTunes (11.1) earlier this week.
But the first time I opened the new software something was quite wrong. My podcast list had entries for all the episodes of every podcast I subscribe to, including episodes I had long since listened to and deleted. I thought it was a glitch of the conversion, so I just tried to delete them manually. But now there's no way to delete entries from the podcast episode list. Well, that's a nuisance, since some of my podcasts have more than a hundred available episodes. And then on some podcasts I have been listening to epsiodes out of sequence and deleting them is a way to 'remember' that I've already listened to them.
But I'm used to Apple software being a bit quirky so I did a search thinking there must be a way to do this that is not obvious to me. I quickly found a forum on the topic in the Apple Support Communities website. It turns out it's not just me. Other people have noticed this and there does not seem to be a workaround.
One guy said he reverted to the previous version (11.0.5) and that sounded like just the ticket for me. But Apple does not make older versions available. I found a website called Old Apps that purports to have a copy of the software for free download. But I wasn't sure I wanted to trust this download blindly. So, I posted an inquiry about it in the support forum. But it was deleted by the moderator because Apple does not approve of getting their software from others.
So, my questions are: Is there any place to get a reliable earlier version of iTunes? If so, is installing it a good idea? Are there alternatives to iTunes for managing content for my iPod and are they any good?
Please excuse the diversion from the primary purpose of this site. But people share on all kinds of topics here and there's a wide variety of experience that I'd like to tap in on without the heavy hand of the Apple content moderators interfering.