iTunes Keeps Turning Off the Podcast Tap
Speaking of podcasts, does this ever happen to you? I don’t auto-synchronize my download podcasts in iTunes to my iPod. Instead, I choose which ones to move over and listen to.
As a result, iTunes periodically stops downloading new episodes of each podcast. It doesn’t matter how recently I’ve listened to an episode–every couple of weeks it just freezes the downloads. I looked for a setting to turn off this, uh, moderation, but couldn’t find one.
Does this happen to anybody else?
December 14th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Yup, happens all the time. I can’t figure it out, either. For me, if I right-click the podcast name and select “Update Podcast”, it fixes the issue for a while.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Oh, and it happened for me before I even had an ipod. I doubt it has to do with ipod syncing.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Your screenshot there indicates that the episodes for the stopped podcasts are listed as “unlistened” (blue dot).
I think what’s happening is, because you’re synchronizing manually, the listened status of your episodes isn’t getting synced back, iTunes thinks you’re not listening to that show, and it stops downloading after (I think) five unlistened episodes.
You can always right-click or control-click on the podcast show name and choose Update Podcast to force it to reload. Also make sure to choose Do Not Auto Delete if you want to avoid that.
I don’t think you can turn off the “feature” entirely, however.
December 14th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Derek hit the nail on the head.
I understand why Apple did this, otherwise podcasts would be filling up hard drives big time.
However, I really wish I could select retention levels *per* podcast. For some podcasts, I want to keep each episode; for others, I only care about the most recent one… Granularity would be a huge step forward.
December 15th, 2007 at 6:47 am
johnny0
Totally agree with you on that. It’s frustrating to have the same settings for all podcasts; I’d like to have a backlog of Rocketboom episodes, but really don’t care if I have more than one Keith and the Girl saved.
Maybe at the next oohing and ahhing Mac fest, Steve will introduce such a feature (and then act like it’s the greatest thing since electricity).