When apple finally started supporting podcasting the implementation was so shoddy it felt like they were forced to support it but that they really really hated the format. Well, it’s taken apple, what, two years? and finally they’ve left it … still poorly implemented.
Of all the problems though, to me the biggest was, somehow they made podcasts downloaded from iTunes behave differently from podcasts downloaded through other mechanisms.
They created a special section in the menus for podcasts. But it didn’t trigger off any particular metadata (that was editable through iTunes) so I couldn’t take podcasts that didn’t come through iTunes and fix them up to appear there.
Ok, so podcasts downloaded from iTunes get to go into the new section and podcasts downloaded any other way just goes into the music pile. I guess that’s OK. Through smart play lists I can create my own list to hold my podcasts. They have their list and I have mine.
But wait, iTunes podcasts were showing up in my lists. As far as the smart play lists were concerned, iTunes podcasts were just like regular podcasts. Cool, I can just use one list, my smart play list to get at both iTunes and non-iTunes podcasts.
Denied! Although iTunes podcasts show up in the smart play lists, they can’t be played from there. (!?)
So if you had a smart play list that was limited to the 20 most recent podcasts and let’s say 3 of them were downloaded through iTunes, you’d see 20 tracks in iTunes and on the iPod, but when you started playing the list you’d see the counter said it was playing 1 of 17. Why? To serve us better I guess.
Ok, I guess I just have to subscribe to all my podcasts using the same mechanism. But wait! Not so easy because iTunes does not support opml files for either import or export. So I have to move them all by hand, one by one.
I moved all my subscriptions into Juice, which has it’s own issues but at least mp3 files which happen to be podcasts will behave like mp3 files with respect to play lists.
But how to I get all the old podcasts that I still have to listen to out of their special, iTunes only, resort menu?
I tried pulling the MP3s out of iTunes entirely and re-importing them but NO, iTunes still knew they were special and treated them that way. So clearly there was something about the files themselves.
I finally found out what that was.
When iTunes downloads a podcasts it adds a special extended tag ITUNESPODCAST=1, to the MP3. It doesn’t expose that tag through the iTunes interface, so you can’t change it easily. But using a tag editor such as MP3Tag you can find this tag and delete it, turning this “special” MP3 into a normal MP3 that obeys all of your finely crafted smart play lists
Oh, except smart play lists are now broken on my new iPod classic.
Damn!
Gibson is set to introduce the first automatically tuning guitar. I wonder what took so long? This seemed like an obvious idea to me since the electronic tuner was invented.