gPodder is a multiplatform free software that allows us to manage and download our favorite podcasts.

For those who do not know what a podcast is, it's like a radio program, but podcasts are usually not broadcast live and can be downloaded from the Internet anytime.
There are a multitude variety of podcast channels. So it is only necessary to go to pages such as www.ipodder.org and see many existing podcasts.

gPodder allows you to download and organize episodes/chapters of our favorite podcasts. The use of the program is very simple, so we need to copy the URL of the podcast that we want to listen to. For example, if we want to download the chapters of the Podcast Veteran Gamers, we need to enter the URL of podbean (http://o35s.podbean.com/) using the option “ Subscriptions->Add podcast via URL ” (Ctrl+L). Once this is done, we will see a list with the last 20 episodes of the podcast, which we can download to our PC. We will be able to select the episodes we want to download in such a way that it is not necessary to download them to our PC. At any time, we will have access to the list of episodes, and we will be able to download those that are not yet on the hard disk.

We can also use the option of “ Subscriptions->Discover new podcasts ” (Ctrl+F). to find new podcasts. From this option, we will look for new programs on the database of gpodder.net or even subscribe to Soundcloud and Youtube channels; if we know the URL of an OPML file, we will be able to enter it in this section and download the associated files with this file.

We need to know that this program only downloads and organizes the podcast chapters. The system's default media player will be used to play the files.

If we make use of an iPod, we can configure the program to synchronize the episodes of the podcasts with the iPod in such a way that we don't have to transfer or delete episodes manually.

The program has several extra functionalities that can be activated using extensions ( Edit->Preferences->Extensions ). We will be able to change the downloaded file's name automatically, normalize the volume, convert downloaded videos to mp4/avi/m4v, convert audio files to mp3/ogg, and more.

If we subscribe to many podcasts, the more likely the space on our hard disk will decrease over time. With this software, we can program the deletion of the episodes after X days since we have listened to those episodes, so our hard drive does not fill up with all the downloaded podcast files.

The program may ask us to install python and PyGTK when we install the program. We must not worry, as these two programs are needed to run this software and are not malicious. python is the programming language in which this software is developed, so these two packages are not more than the necessary python libraries and dependencies to launch the software.