Comments on: Podcasts, iTunes and iPod

By: embee

embee — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:10:49 +0000

Or Apple could actually work bugs out of the system that have been there for years. There is a podcast menu. There has been since 4G. Yet podcasts downloaded in iTunes don’t show up in the Podcast menu on the iPod (which remains blank – think different: no podcasts in the podcast menu).

The solution is for people at One Infinite Loop to make a patch that puts anything tagged with “Podcast” in the Podcast menu on the iPod and not have it in the Music menu or the Videos menu. If they’re worth their salt, it should take a new hire all of a weekend to code the patch. But what do I know – I’m just some guy who thinks that people who are paid to program should do their job and do it well.

Workarounds are just that – a way to work around the problem without fixing it. This bug has existed for years and, given the poor, lazy design of the Classic, which includes such gems as having Compilations show up multiple times in Coverflow, will probably remain for many months to come.

By: snowjunkie

snowjunkie — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:31:31 +0000

Thanks Jared. Better late than never! ;-)

By: Jared

Jared — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:17:52 +0000

Kind of late on the response, but:

If you go to the Podcasts section of iTunes and select all (ctrl + A), you can set all of your podcasts to “part of a compilation”. This will muck up your compilations menu on your iPod, of course, but at least your Artists section will be podcast-free.

The podcasts will still be listed under the Podcast menu as long as you don’t change the genre from Podcast.

By: Brad L

Brad L — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:20:05 +0000

Yeah, I’m grappling with this problem as we speak… There’s much I like about my iPod, but much that’s just plain infuriating and totally illogical.

Why should getting podcasts out of the music categories require such hop, skip, and jumping on the part of the user? It makes absolutely no sense that it should be in there in the first place.

I don’t want it playing in my music, and I don’t want it showing in my music. I don’t want to have to scroll through a dozen podcasts when I’m looking through albums, artists, or songs.

If I want to look for podcasts, I’ll look through (wait for it) ‘Podcasts.’

Such poor management… and after I was happy to have finally come to terms with the gymnastics and magic incantations required to keep it from splitting up my soundtracks and other ‘various artists’ albums into seperate ‘albums’ for each individual combination of performers.

“It just works” Yeah right. So long as you aren’t terribly concerned with HOW WELL it works.

By: snowjunkie

snowjunkie — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 03:02:46 +0000

Hi Irene, glad to see I’m not the only one that sees this!
I see CNET have put the Zune and iPod classic head to head and come up with a draw!

By: Irene Balogun

Irene Balogun — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:07:18 +0000

I’ve been wrestling with this for the last few days too. The “only music” playlist is the best solution I’ve seen but it doesn’t fix the real problem. If I want to find all my Modest Mouse songs, I go to Music->Artists and in order to get to Modest Mouse I have to scroll past all sorts of Podcast artists.

One solution I’ve seen is to change all Podcast artist tags to “Podcast”. You’d still have the problem with album tags though (and could theoretically apply the same solution). No way to get them out of the songs list though :(

I’ve been very disappointed with my ipod’s “easy user interface”

By: snowjunkie

snowjunkie — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:31:30 +0000

Heh heh.. Thanks Neil!

By: Neil Kerr

Neil Kerr — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:25:15 +0000

I know you are a computer genius and you probably have this worked out already but if you go the iTunes File Menu and choose New Smart Playlist you can build you dynamic playlists based on your rules

Enter the following to solve your problem

Kind Does Not Contain Video
Kind Does Not Contain Quicktime
Genre Is Not Podcast
Genre Is Not Audiobook

Give it a name and save it. Ta Da – you now have a playlist which contains only music. You might have to add an additional clause if you have other nonmusical genres in your library.

By: snowjunkie

snowjunkie — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:43:54 +0000

I think I’ve found the setting you talk about. I’ve set that and I’ll see if it prevents the podcasts playing in shuffle mode. Thanks for the help.

By: Bryan Thompson

Bryan Thompson — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 15:12:16 +0000

OK … on my iPod, yes, I have my podcasts listed under Music > Album too. Hmm! That does make sense to me though as it is part of the content of your iPod, no?

If you want to STOP the podcasts playing with your music, when you click to shuffle the iPod content, I was saying that you should go to your iTunes folder, highlight the Podcast you’ve subscribed too (NOT each individual one listed under the podcast!! i.e. select the podcast called “story4all’s podcast” not the individual episodes). Then right click the podcast and select “Get Info”. Down the bottom it says “Skip When Shuffling” with the option Yes or No. Choose Yes and click the little tick box to enable that choice. Click OK and now when you’re shuffling your podcasts will not mix with your music!

The other thing about playlists I said before is still my favourite way to go through all my podcasts I want to listen too (without music interruption).

Is this getting near to your problem with the iPod? Hope so.