Hi Shaun,
On Saturday, September 22, 2007, at 11:35AM, "VaShaun Jones" wrote:
> Hope this makes sense.
>
> Esther
> > Yes it does and I found it out when I went to play one. Do I
> > just
>lleave them as is even once I listen to them? I tried to delete what
>I thought was one epasode and it was trying to delete the whole feed.
You probably want to delete individual episodes and not the folder --
at least, not if you still are subscribing to the podcast <smile>.
You can control the default behavior with the iTunes preferences,
podcast preference pane. Bring up iTunes Preferences with
command+comma. You can use the right and left arrow keys, and
VO-keys+space bar at the pane you want, but since I know that the podcast
preference pane is number 2, just use command+2 to select that pane.
VO-keys down arrow into the pane and VO-keys right arrow to check the
available preference settings. There are 3 options given with popup buttons.
1) Check for new episodes: Every day (Every hour, Every week, Manually)
next VO-keys right arrow gives you a message like:
"Next check: Tomorrow 7:30 AM"
2) When new episodes are available: Download the most recent one
(Download all, Do nothing)
3) Keep: All unplayed episodes (All episodes, Most recent episode, Last
2,3,4,5, or 10 episodes)
The last preference option determines how many podcasts are kept in your
iTunes library. And there's another set of preference options that determine
how many podcasts are kept on your iPod if you automatically
sync.
You actually have more options, because the contextual menu in the Songs
Outline will let you flag individual episodes as exceptions to these
preference rules. So, say that you set iTunes to delete podcasts after
you've listened to them, but you came across a really great program that
you want to keep. You could select this podcast in the Songs Outline
of your Podcasts Library and using the contextual menu (VO-keys+shift+m)
choose "Do Not Auto Delete". Then that episode would only stay deleted
if you explicitly deleted it with the delete key. If there are entire
podcast series that you want to mark "Do Not Auto Delete" you can select
at the folder level (or select multiple folders, or multiple episodes)
and apply this setting with the contextual menu.
If you want to reverse this decision, you can mark podcasts with the
"Allow Auto Delete" selection selection in the contextual menu.
In general, the menu options for managing your podcasts subscriptions
that you might see or select are:
"Update Podcast" - refreshes the feed information and manually
checks for new podcasts
"Mark As New" - status in first column of Songs Outline is flagged
as new for episode, and also for folder, to
indicate there are new podcasts
"Mark As Not New" - mark status as not new even if you have started
playing the podcast
"Allow Auto Delete" - let default auto delete preferences work
"Do Not Auto Delete" - do not let episode be auto deleted by iTunes
"Download a Podcast Episode" - get episode from feed
"Subscribe to Podcast"- subscribe to podcast for which you have previously
downloaded episodes or subscribed
"Unsubscribe to Podcast" - unsubscribe to a podcast
This also brings up a question Holly raised some time ago. Why does
iTunes continue to download some podcast episodes which have been
manually deleted?
It turns out that if you "Download a Podcast Episode" (or episodes)
other than the episodes that arrive automatically by subscription,
iTunes flags these as "Do Not Auto Delete" -- and remembers this.
So, for example, if you have iTunes set to only download the latest
podcast episode, and you used the contextual menu to "Download a
Podcast Episode" because two episodes were released in the interval
when iTunes last checked the feed, or because your laptop was not
connected at the time another episode was released, etc. then these
episodes are marked as "Do Not Auto Delete". If you manually
delete them, and the podcasts are still available on the feed when
iTunes checks again, they may get resurrected (if you did not
mark them "Allow Auto Delete" before you manually deleted them.)
"Mark as New" can be used to make sure these podcasts remain on
your iPod if you autosync.
There is also some odd behavior that you can understand if you know
how podcasts and podcast feeds work under iTunes. For example, the
information posted to an RSS feed is only as good as what the
provider supplies, and sometimes defective (or incorrect) descriptions
go out, or the links point to the wrong files, or the files have
problems. Since iTunes is only providing the information, this isn't
something they can fix (except, perhaps, by passing on an error report
to the podcast provider).
One time I had a podcast subscription incorrectly point to last
week's episode as the new release. (Yes, even the BBC does this!).
Deleting the podcast didn't help; according to iTunes I had received
the weekly download. Using "Download a Podcast Episode" also didn't help,
because I was pointed to the same incorrect address. They'd fixed the
error, but I couldn't get to the new file! Since I'd started my
subscription in the old, inaccessible days of iTunes by adding the
RSS feed URL from the BBC, I ended up going to the iTunes Store page
and getting the episode. By that time the iTunes Store had started
moving podcasts to their own mirrored servers, so the podcast
feed was at a different URL. This means that a new folder (with
the same name) got created in my podcast directory (and only holds
that one episode). If I had known more at the time, I could have
forced the feed to refresh ("Update Podcast") and gotten the
correct download and information from my default feed.
Another odd story is that one time iTunes started moving a lot of
the podcasts distributed from the iTunes Store to mirrored servers,
and a few of these couldn't handle the bandwidth of the requests.
So certain podcast series had a lot of time outs and failed downloads.
It was apparent that some of the new servers were the problem, because
anyone who got their subscriptions from the original provider's
podcast feeds (because they had subscribed by adding the URL in
the Advanced Menu -- the only method in the old inaccessible days
of iTunes) had no problems.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Esther
