iTunes Smart Playlists and Podcasts
This is a deal breaker for me. As far as I can tell, there is no way to reference podcasts downloaded using iTunes in smart playlists. Podcasts and any playlist functionality are completely separate.
This means that I can't listen to podcasts in the car.
The iPod interface for the BMW requires that you have playlists named "BMW1 xxx", "BMW2 xxx", etc... These then become CD 1, CD 2 for the purposes of accessing the playlists from the head unit in the car. As I can't get the podcasts into the playlists, I can't listen to them in the car.
The implementation of podcasting in iTunes really was not thought out well at all...
Ah well, never mind. I'm still using my own podcatching software, Katana, and that works just fine. As do all the other podcatchers.
But I can't believe Apple would miss supporting key functionality (playlists) with new functionality. This smacks of a rushed design.
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Interesting. When I access the iTunes library from my TiVo over TiVo Desktop, there's a new playlist called "podcasts" that contains the new podcasts. However, the new Podcasts source group doesn't seem to be addressable as a playlist with AppleScript. You can, though, manually drag podcast files from the Podcasts source group into a regular dumb playlist.
Yup - agree you can do the drag/drop thing, but it kind of misses the point about podcasting - the automation. I can't organize them automatically via smart playlists (or any other form of automation) like I can with music.
I'm sure this'll be addressed at some point.
Yeah, I was a little bothered by the smart playlist thing myself. Here's a workaround: on the iPod, create a smart playlist called 'BMW ..whatever' and only include tracks with the genre specifed as 'Podcast'.
Matt, I tried that - that's what I do for podcasts coming in from an external aggregator. But the smart playlist appears to be ignoring podcasts downloaded by iTunes itself, even though they are marked with a genre of 'Podcast'.
There is an easy hack to get your iTunes 4.9 Podcasts to show up in your smart playlist.
This hack comes from the iTunes Tips Wiki. "After selecting all the podcasts in iTunes (click the purple podcast link, press ctrl-a in windows or Apple-a in Mac) create a new playlist from the selection (File->Create playlist from Selection). Once this playlist is created, downloaded podcasts show up in your smart playlists, even after removing this tempory playlist. My assumption is that iTunes is failing to index downloaded podcasts." The only catch to this is that not all Podcasts downloaded from iTunes have the genre set to "podcast", so they might not feed into the smart playlist.
Hope this helps.