iTunes Podcast Problem Solved
I’d been having an annoying problem in iTunes 7.0.2: although I’d set the podcast preferences to “Keep: Last 5 episodes”, it was still keeping old episodes around, long after they should have been deleted.
After rooting around in Apple’s discussion fora, the solution turned out to be:
- Select “Podcasts” in the left bar
- Select everything with Apple-A
- Right-click (or Ctrl-click, for a one-button mouse) on the mass of selected episodes, and select “Allow Auto Delete”
When I next updated the podcasts, it deleted the old episodes, just as it should have. Presumably some podcasts or episodes got marked as “Do Not Auto Delete” somehow, perhaps when I upgraded iTunes, or moved stuff from the old Mac.
The annoying part is that there’s no indication in iTunes that Auto Delete has been disabled. That seems like just the sort of UI thing that Apple would have added, given that there are a zillion other status indicators.
Update, Dec. 2, 2006: Apparently when you click the “Get” button to manually download a podcast episode, it is automatically (and invisibly) marked as “do no auto delete”.
Typically this happens to me when I subscribe to a new podcast: iTunes downloads the latest episode automatically, but I normally download several more, in case I like it. Those episodes don’t get deleted automatically.
Hi,
Thanks for the tip–but have you noticed that the function doesn’t work with all podcasts? I’m running iTunes 7, and yesterday, per your instructions, selected all my podcasts and then selected “Allow Auto Delete”. Upon refreshing my subscriptions, iTunes did delete most, but not all, of the podcasts that had been either marked as played or actually played. Is this some more iTunes weirdness or am I missing something?
francesco:
If, like me, you have the preferences set to “Keep: last 5 episodes”, then you should have the 5 most recent episodes in iTunes, whether they’ve been played or not.
If you want to keep only unplayed episodes, you should set it to “Keep: all unplayed episodes” or some such. However, I don’t like this because iTunes considers that any podcast that you’ve started is “played”. So if you start listening to an episode, get interrupted, and refresh your podcasts before you finish listening, that episode will be lost.
I’m having the same issue with old podcasts being kept around forever. What I discovered after digging around for a bit was that the play count on the podcast is/was not being updated. I only listen to podcasts I download via iTunes on my iPod Nano. {5G}. It sync’s the podcasts to my nano without issue {removing any podcasts from my ipod that I have dutifully played.) however it’s not recording or updating that played information in the podcast itself in the iTunes library. If I play the podcast with iTunes, {skipping to the end to let it run through} it will delete that podcast the next time I refresh.
Its a bit of a bummer, and I wish I had an answer for fixing it.
Chainguns:
Check both the Podcasts tab in the settings, and the iPod options. I bet you’ve got it set to do something sensible on the iPod, and something less sensible (like keep everything) in iTunes itself.