Juice

WebbIE comes with a podcatcher program, but many people like using the open-source free Juice program (formerly iPodder). However, this was last updated in 2005. Since then Windows Vista and Windows 7 have been released, and Juice does not work on these platforms without doing some configuration changes.

Here is a Windows Installer (MSI) file that installs Juice 2.2 on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7. 32- and 64-bit Windows machines are supported. The file can be downloaded and run to launch the installer - that's all that is required, no more changing Compatibility settings or editing config files. However, it will still sometimes complain when you close it - a message about a log file - and I can't fix that.

Please note that I don't develop the program, I don't support it, and I haven't even used it. I won't help you if you have any problems.

If you have previously tried to install Juice and it hasn't worked then you may have left your system in a state where the installer won't be able to get it started. Here's what you can try:

  1. Uninstall Juice.
  2. Delete the folder "iPodder" from your Application folder. Here are two ways to do this:
    1. Open Windows Explorer. Go to the navigation bar by pressing Alt and D. Type "%appdata%" - that's percentage sign, A P P D A T A, percentage sign - and press return. Cursor down to the folder called iPodder. Press delete to delete the folder.
    2. Start a commandline. Type "del %appdata%\Ipodder" and press return. Press y and return to confirm.
  3. Install the installer from this page and run it.

Technical details

Here are the details of what I did in case anyone wants to improve on it.

A new installer file was needed. I created an MSI Windows Installer with WiX installer. Here is the WiX source file and the installation SourceDir. I harvested the registry entries by running on a clean Windows machine, so I think everything is there.

The iPodder folder in %appdata% needed to contain an ipodder.cfg file with the correct file paths. I created a VB6 launcher program, JuiceLauncher.exe, that is the target of the Juice shortcuts. It creates the folder, works out the correct file paths, and writes the ipodder.cfg file into the folder. Then it launches Juice.exe. JuiceLauncherSource.zip

I'm slightly surprised that Windows doesn't just virtualize the error log writing and prevent the error messages you see. Any suggestions welcome. I could flag the program as "run as administrator" but that's poor security policy, especially when I know nothing about the code.

The whole program is under the GNU Public Licence version 2.