Zune Podcasts is a tool that I developed to help the dedicated community on the Zune subreddit download and sync podcasts to their aging MP3 players. The Zune software is quite finicky when it comes to parsing RSS feeds. Sloppy feeds will cause it to crash. Zune Podcasts can clean up problematic feeds so the desktop software can read them.

After Zune Podcasts went live, I discovered another issue users were facing. The Zune launched in 2006, when Windows XP still reigned supreme. While the Zune software can run in Windows 10, there's a small number of users that have either moved to Mac OS or simply have no need for a desktop or laptop running Windows since the Zune launched all those years ago. But they keep around an old PC to sync with their beloved music player. For ripping CDs and syncing audio, this works fine. Downloading podcast episodes over TLS when Microsoft stopped updating certificate authorities on a 20 year old operating system does not work, however. To address this, I added a new mode to proxy podcast content over a plain http connection.