Thanks to Marc Canter's post, And what about the Aggregator Vendors? I'm reminded that there is still work to do before I've turned RSS Bandit into a satisfactory podcast client. With the basic code for downloading podcasts now implemented I've now turned my mind to how to get the downloaded rich media content onto a user's device and/or media player of choice. For the most part, I'm assuming that people are either using iTunes (version 6 or later) or Windows Media Player (version 10 or later).

Getting the music or videos onto a playlist in the users media player seems to be mostly straightforward. I've found C# sample code for creating playlists in iTunes and creating playlists in Windows Media Player. The tricky part has been figuring out how to get the music onto the users portable media player  (e.g. their iPod or Creative Zen) as opposed to their PC hard drive and creating a playlist on the device that includes the newly downloaded file. Doing the first isn't that bad if the device can be mounted as an external hard drive because the user can just specify that RSS Bandit should download files to a folder on that external drive. On the other hand, none of the sample code I've seen talks about creating a playlist on the portable media player. Any help here from my readers would be greatly appreciated. 

PS: I briefly considered embedding an instance of Windows Media Player in RSS Bandit but that seems like overkill compared to just having a [Play] button that opens the file in the user's preferred media player for that file type.