Re-download podcasts without subscribing again

For some unknown reason, I lost a few episodes of a podcast, so iTunes showed them with an exclamation mark and no obvious way to re-download them. Searching the web for a way to make iTunes to re-download them came up with lots of comments about having to unsubscribe and resubscribe. I didn't want to do that, because I still had a bunch of episodes that I wanted to keep, and I didn't want to have to download those again.

After playing with iTunes a bit, I found a pretty simple way to do it. First I clicked the triangle to expand the podcast series and then deleted the missing episodes (the ones with the exclmation) by selecting them and hitting the backspace key. After that, I collapsed the podcast series by clicking the triangle, and then expanded it again while holding the option key (I think it would be shift on Windows), causing iTunes to update the podcast and add back in the episodes I just deleted.

The re-added episodes had the 'Get' buttons again, allowing them to be re-downloaded.

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Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: Coumerelli on Dec 12, '05 07:54:07AM

aww man! Beautiful. This needs to be tagged as the 'Hint of the Week'

first of all, I needed this early on because there were some podcasts I wanted to listen to again and I couldn't - but now, hey! I can

secondly, I just need to get used to the idea of pressing the option key anywhere and everywhere in OS X. What a gem!

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"The best way to accelerate a PC is 9.8 m/s2"

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: cougar718 on May 06, '06 11:05:11AM

SWEET! Just started listening to PodCasts and was searching for a way to keep the list of episodes in iTunes without having to keep the actual file on my HD.

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Rick alias cougar

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: sjk on May 06, '06 03:32:23PM

I like to do the same thing, although podcast episodes (especially older ones for frequently updated feeds, e.g. rocketboom) can eventually disappear so if you've removed their iTunes entries there's no way to get them back. One workaround for that is deleting podcast files after listening and keeping their corresponding iTunes entries, losing the ability to "Get" the original files again (assuming they remained on the server). Otherwise, if I delete both a podcast episode and its iTunes entry there's no guarantee that episode still exists on the server if I refresh the feed. I just manually download any episodes of potential interest before they have a chance to disappear, then decide later what to with the files and iTunes entries.

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: hedgeland on Dec 12, '05 08:16:02AM

Thank you! That's been a minor annoyance I've had with iTunes' podcast functionality. I will be using this hint a lot!

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: Nem on Dec 12, '05 10:49:56AM

Excellent hint!

Messing around with iTunes on Windows shows that holding down the Shift key while clicking on the triangle gives similar functionality.

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Nem W. Schlecht
http://geekmuse.net/

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: shadownight on Dec 12, '05 01:55:47PM

Wow! thanks a lot, very useful!

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: Tom Robinson on Dec 12, '05 02:04:07PM

Have you tried just clicking on the exclamation mark? IIRC that's what worked for me on a dead episode last night...

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: sjk on Dec 13, '05 07:07:33PM

Clicking the grey-circled exclamation point after creating a "dead" podcast episode by manually deleting its file had no effect.

Thanks a bunch for this hint. It's the simple podcast "unget" capability I've been looking for.

Re-download podcasts without subscribing again
Authored by: ulfda on Jan 06, '09 02:39:40PM

This is an awesome hint! I've been looking for this solution for a very long time. My problem has been download of faulty episodes, which happens more often than you might think. Thank you for this excellent hint!

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