My iTunes is messed up

Podcast syncing in my iTunes Jukebox (or whatever the name Apple wants us to use for it) is broken.

I’ve it set to “Sync all unplayed episodes of all podcasts”. iTunes reports that I currently have 11 unplayed podcasts in my iTunes library. However, the iPod holds only 5 podcasts after updating.

At least it’s better now. After the first update today my iPod held only one podcast.

There’s plenty of free space on the iPod, and I can’t tell if there’s some switch somewhere that I need to flick. Piece of buggy software.

What other, easy to use podcasting clients are available? I’m also missing the ability to add non-podcast files to my podcast queue, say in the case of presentations where I don’t have a feed, but only the direct download.