iTunes: I’m Sorry, Mike, I Can’t Do That
by Michael Camilleri
One of the main reasons I switched to iTunes (and the iPod) was the way it handled podcasts. I listen to quite a few podcasts and this would be intensely frustrating without a setup that automatically handled the downloading, copying and deleting of these files.
For the most part iTunes is pretty good at what it does. But every now and then there are problems. One that’s popped up a few times recently has been iTunes’ failure to auto delete podcasts once I’ve listened to them.
With the setup I currently have, it should do this for all podcasts unless I explicitly flag one as ‘Do Not Auto Delete’. Most of the time it works but occasionally iTunes makes the executive decision that I really shouldn’t lose that episode of Slate’s Explainer podcast and refuses to let it go. When I right-click on the podcast I find it’s been set not to auto delete. What gives?
I’ve had a quick look with Google but I haven’t had any luck finding an answer. Everyone else that has a similar problem simply hasn’t listened to a podcast to the end. This is not the case in my situation (you can see in the screenshot that the podcast has been listened to and I can confirm I didn’t stop it early, it went all the way through).
Anyone have any suggestions?
Comments
I only have the extremely unhelpful suggestion of just managing them manually, it is the solution I ended up going to with my podcasts because it was easier to just clean them up myself every couple of days than mark some as do not delete and rely on auto delete
It’s not unhelpful and in fact I’m doing a version of that already, I think :) I gave up trying to use iTunes’ ‘Downloaded all’ feature for new episodes after it kept downloading podcasts I’d already listen to so currently I’m manually refreshing the list. It’s not that big a pain to go in and right-click on the list; it’s just something that doesn’t seem to have a clear cause. When iTunes would download previously listened podcasts I could understand that as maybe the fault of the podcast provider (changing the URLs of old podcasts, for instance). This, however, seem to be all Apple’s fault and I’d love to know what’s going wrong.
Yeah, I use download all myself, but I stopped using automatic downloading because a) I only really sync my iPod once a day anyway, and b) I would forget to turn it off when I used my laptop at friends places, and it occasionally does decide to download the entire backlog of a podcast, I accidentally used up most of Hamish’s family usage one month with that =(.
One thing I do find that helps for keeping podcasts clean is that I have all bar the ones I want to keep kept expanded on my podcasts screen, so it is really easy to see ones I have listened to but have not yet deleted.
Yeah, I do the same thing re: keeping them expanded. And I have one collapsed as well! Twins!