How to recover from podcast URL corruption in iTunes

Oct 20, '06 07:30:06AM

Contributed by: hamarkus

Recently all my podcasts in iTunes had been showing the invalid URL warning. This had happened after I had used a wireless access point in a hotel. As it is common, when accessing a web page from that location, I was first redirected to the provider's site and logged in from there. While connected there, I also updated my podcasts.

Being home again, all my podcast URLs started, as seen via right-click: Show Description, with http://www.arrowlink.com..., the name of the access provider. I could even see the name of the hotel as part of the URL. Evidently, iTunes could not resolve these URLs.

Since it is impossible to change the URL from within iTunes (and since the URL does not seem to be stored in an easily accessible preference file), the official way is to re-subscribe to the podcast(s). If you have any old episodes, the most elegant way is to do this is to drag them all to the desktop, delete them (and the podcast entry) from within iTunes, drag them back into the podcast window area and click Subscribe. You will lose play counts and ratings, so you might want to take a screenshot before doing so. You can keep play counts and ratings by simply re-subscribing via the podcast directory, but then you will then have two entries for the same podcast.

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