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IPod/ITunes help needed

KilarneyKilarney
edited September 2006 in Everything Else
I have a question, and was hoping somebody here could save me some research.

I just got my new IPod Nano. I currently have ITunes set to keep only unplayed podcasts. For some reason, some played podcasts are being downloaded onto my Nano.

Here is what I would like:
If I play a podcast, I'd like it erased - gone... see ya later. Is there a way to do this? Call me crazy, but I thought this would happen when I chose to keep "all unplayed episodes."

Basically, I don't want to sift through a bunch of podcasts that I've already listened to, and I'd like to keep my Nano as clean as possible.

Comments

  • RymRym
    I can't say exactly what I've done, since I'm at work, but I can at least tell you that my nano is set up exactly the way you want. It's certainly possible.
  • KilarneyKilarney
    One other thing I've noticed...
    Is there any way to prevent podcasts from being listed in the albums subdirectory? I only want music albums listed there.
  • AprecheApreche
    First you have to make sure you tell iTunes 7 to "sync all episodes of all podcasts". Next, you have to realize that any podcast will remain unplayed unless you listen to the entire thing. If you stop listening even 5 seconds before it's over, it won't be marked as played. This is annoying, and I wish I could set a threshold. You just have to manually delete, or mark as played, episodes which you are done with but have not been marked as played. If a podcast is marked as played and you refesh the podcasts, it will be deleted. When it syncs, which iTunes 7 does automatically, it will be removed from the iPod.

    Also, you can mark a podcast or an episode as "do not autodelete". This is useful if you want to keep an episode or show forever. I do this for Derek the Bandit's Sound Republic so I can listen to his psychedelic trance mixes over and over again whenever I want.

    Another hint is that sometimes iTunes will dreg up old episodes of a podcast because of the way it handles reading RSS feeds and such. To prevent this from happening I tell iTunes to "do nothing" when new episodes are available. That way when there is a new episode I click "get" to actually download it. When new episodes show up that aren't actually new, I delete them. In my experience, if you let iTunes to decide when to download episodes, you are asking for trouble.
  • AprecheApreche
    One other thing I've noticed...
    Is there any way to prevent podcasts from being listed in the albums subdirectory? I only want music albums listed there.
    The answer to this kind of question is always "Smart Playlist". Just make a smart playlist of everything in your libarary that is not a podcast.
  • KilarneyKilarney
    edited September 2006
    Thanks, guys.
    Post edited by Kilarney on
  • RymRym
    Next, you have to realize that any podcast will remain unplayed unless you listen to the entire thing. If you stop listening even 5 seconds before it's over, it won't be marked as played.
    Mine marks something as "played" if I listen to so much as a second of it. I have to be careful not to sync my ipod until I've listened to everything I've started.
  • KilarneyKilarney
    The only other issue I've noticed is that it seems like ITunes thinks it is smarter than you when it comes to album titles. I have some titles that it thinks are in two different albums - even though this is not true. I've even gone through the ID3 tags to make sure that they are correct, and they are. For some reason, ITunes is not following the ID3 tag.
  • KilarneyKilarney
    edited September 2006
    Mine marks something as "played" if I listen to so much as a second of it. I have to be careful not to sync my ipod until I've listened to everything I've started.
    Mine does too. The weird thing was that ITunes is leaving played podcasts on my system. That's what was bothering me. I guess they are not downloading to my IPod, but I want them off my hard drive.
    Post edited by Kilarney on
  • RymRym
    edited September 2006
    Mine does too. The weird thing was that it had left some played podcasts on my system. That's what was bothering me. I guess they are not downloading to my IPod, but I want them off my hard drive.
    Under podcast settings, tell it to "keep all unplayed episodes." That setting for iTunes' files is seperate from the settings for the nano itself.
    Post edited by Rym on
  • KilarneyKilarney
    I did that. That's the weird thing.
  • KilarneyKilarney
    The only other issue I've noticed is that it seems like ITunes thinks it is smarter than you when it comes to album titles. I have some titles that it thinks are in two different albums - even though this is not true. I've even gone through the ID3 tags to make sure that they are correct, and they are. For some reason, ITunes is not following the ID3 tag.
    I got this one straightened out by editing the ID3 tags from within ITunes itself.
  • KilarneyKilarney
    I think I finally figured this out. ITunes will consider a podcast to be "played" if any portion of it is played. ITunes will only delete the file from the hard drive if the entire podcast has been played. (Assuming you have selected "keep all unplayed episodes")

    A minor annoyance for sure.
  • KilarneyKilarney
    edited September 2006
    Nevermind... that doesn't seem to work.

    ITunes handles my Nano fine, but for some reason it insists on making me manually delete to get it off of my hard drive. Grr...

    I'm thinking about switching my settings to keep only the latest file, whether or not it has been played. This seemed to work ok. The only bummer is that my Nano will have played files on it. Once they are played, I'd really like to get them off of my Nano. But... it's my hard drive that I'm more likely to forget about. I guess, then, that I'll switch to keep just the latest episode.

    I've also been reading reports that ITunes 7 is buggy. Perhaps this has something to do with that.
    Post edited by Kilarney on
  • PhantasosPhantasos
    I haven't had a lot of the problems with iTunes 7 that a lot of people have been reporting, but podcast deletion is one that I've noticed since the upgrade.
    I have smart playlists set up so that podiobooks will be sorted into one list, non-podiobooks podcasts that have have a playcount of zero will be sorted into another and a third that just has about a gig of my highest rated music on a rotating basis of least recently played. I then tell my mini to sync only those playlists. I never have to worry about it ever not having what I want or running out of space on my 4 gig mini (unless I don't listen to any podcasts for a week and they build up, this is yet to happen).
  • tuttle88tuttle88
    I've got a playlist called "podcasts" where I manually put the ones I want to listen to so I can listen to shows in a specific order and move them around as I wish. I've got a 30gig so I don't have to worry about space but I like being able to order my podcasts myself.
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