Podcast subscriptions and syncing with using iTunes or an iPod

Recon

I’ve been listening to podcasts since around 2006. At the time I was working in the stores department of a Mercedes garage and could get a staff discount on an iPod since they were stocked as an accessory for Mercedes.

I got a job after that doing shift work and listened to a lot of podcasts and found that the subscription and sync features in iTunes with the iPod were great so when that first iPod eventually died I got another.

However in the last year or so I’ve found that my current iPod (a nano), and iTunes in general, aren’t working right.

The iPod frequently takes multiple attempts before it will connect to my laptop to sync podcasts. Nothing seems to make a difference, using new cables, different USB ports, doesn’t matter. It’s often a case of to try and connect it, wait a few seconds to see if it connects in iTunes and the iPod starts charging. If it works great. If not, plug it out and try again. This evening was especially bad. Took maybe a dozen attempts over around 10 minutes.

iTunes will delete a bunch of podcast episodes after an update. It updated last week and when I did get the iPod to connect I saw that I had around 3GB if extra free space on it than I had before be iTunes update. When I looked into why, I saw that a whole bunch of unplayed episodes had been deleted.

So a long way of saying that I’m fed up of messing around with iTunes.

Is there a reliable service for subscribing to podcasts that works similar to how iTunes works? Where I can subscribe to various podcasts, auto download certain ones when new episodes come out, sync them onto an MP3 player for offline listening.

I have an iPhone but it’s not an option to use the podcasts app on it due to battery life of the phone, storage space, data usage, etc.

Or are there alternatives that I’m not considering?