Podcasts: The iPhone’s secret backdoor

As has been established, I’m a champion of syncing your iPhone to multiple computers. But here’s a sticky situation that results from such a set-up. Let’s say you’re at work, and your iPhone is set to sync music and videos with your home Mac. What can be done?

Podcasts, my friend. iPhone can sync podcasts separate from music and videos — and I take advantage of that feature so that I’ve always got current podcasts when I head home from work. While that does mean that every time I sync music and video, my podcasts are wiped from the iPhone and need to be resynced, it does mean that I’ve got a way to get audio onto my iPhone during the day.

Great idea, I said to myself, but how the heck am I going to make a fake podcast that contains audio files from my own hard drive? Dummy up some XML and drop it in my Personal Web Sharing folder? Guh. What a pain.

Enter Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, who (in 2005!) found the need to create fake iTunes podcasts. Since Jalkut’s an actual programmer, he couldn’t just dream about it: he did something about it. More specifically, he created Typecast, a simple Mac utility that lets you drag audio files from your hard drive into a window, press a button, and watch as the files appear magically within iTunes as a podcast.

Jalkut created Typecast without the iPhone in mind, but it sure came in handy for me today, when I wanted to load up an audiobook and a stray MP3 file that somehow had escaped from my regular selection of podcasts. And instead of waiting to load that audio when I got home tonight, it’s on my iPhone right now.