iTunes Podcast Problem Solved
I’d been having an annoying problem in iTunes 7.0.2: although I’d set the podcast preferences to “Keep: Last 5 episodes”, it was still keeping old episodes around, long after they should have been deleted.
After rooting around in Apple’s discussion fora, the solution turned out to be:
- Select “Podcasts” in the left bar
- Select everything with Apple-A
- Right-click (or Ctrl-click, for a one-button mouse) on the mass of selected episodes, and select “Allow Auto Delete”
When I next updated the podcasts, it deleted the old episodes, just as it should have. Presumably some podcasts or episodes got marked as “Do Not Auto Delete” somehow, perhaps when I upgraded iTunes, or moved stuff from the old Mac.
The annoying part is that there’s no indication in iTunes that Auto Delete has been disabled. That seems like just the sort of UI thing that Apple would have added, given that there are a zillion other status indicators.
Update, Dec. 2, 2006: Apparently when you click the “Get” button to manually download a podcast episode, it is automatically (and invisibly) marked as “do no auto delete”.
Typically this happens to me when I subscribe to a new podcast: iTunes downloads the latest episode automatically, but I normally download several more, in case I like it. Those episodes don’t get deleted automatically.