A smart playlist fix for iTunes 'played podcast' behavior

Aug 16, '06 07:30:05AM

Contributed by: ajweiss

As a podcaster (work show/home show), I love the podcast support in iTunes and on the iPod. However, I've always felt that one feature was seriously broken: The option to "Update only unplayed episodes" on the iPod. This feature doesn't work right because iTunes doesn't properly keep track of whether or not a podcast has been played.

In iTunes and on the iPod, a podcast is marked as played if you have listened to any of it at all. This means that if you listen to the first 30 minutes of a 60-minute show, pause it, then listening to something else before finishing the first show, iTunes will consider the first show played and remove it from your iPod on the next synchronization. Not only does this mean you must listen to shows in their entirety between synchronizations, it also almost completely negates a great feature of the iPod: the ability to resume listening to a podcast at the point you left off.

This behavior is entirely different than what increases the the play count for a song in iTunes: you must get to the end of the song before the play count increases. So, if you look at a podcast episode in the Podcasts section, it will looked played when half-finished, but while viewing it as a song, the play count will still be zero. You can use this inconsistency to solve the above problem:

  1. In iTunes' iPod preferences, set your iPod to "Update only checked episodes."
  2. Create a Smart Playlist called Played Podcasts with the following rules: Podcast is true, Play Count is greater than 0, Match only checked songs, and Live Updating.
Because this looks at the podcast episodes as songs, it only populates the playlist with shows you have listened to in their entirety. To remove these shows, simply uncheck the episodes and update your iPod. It isn't as simple as it would be if iTunes used the same rules for podcasts and songs, but it is far easier than managing your podcasts manually.

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