Help me organize the podcasts in my iTunes

February 20, 2006 5:36 PM

Is it possible to move podcasts in iTunes from one folder to another? More indepth question inside:

I subscribe to a few podcasts via the iTunes music store. However, for some of them, iTunes does not offer older casts.

For the Cast On podcast, I was able to find older episodes via Odeo, and downloaded them from there.

Now, there are two folders in my iTunes podcast folder. One is called "Cast On" and has the casts I downloaded from iTunes. The other is called Odeo and has all the casts I've downloaded from Odeo, including some of the older Cast On episodes.

Ideally, I'd like to have *all* the Cast On episodes stored in the Cast On folder, but iTunes won't let me drag them from the Odeo folder to the Cast On folder. I can only drag the casts into a new playlist or a CD to be burned.

I was able to get into my documents folder and drag them into the correct place in the iTunes library folder, but when I relaunch iTunes, the old episodes still show up in the Odeo folder.

Short of creating a smart playlist, is there any easy way to do this?

posted by Brittanie to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Change the ID3 tags for the podcasts so that the artist and title match. iTunes should then sort them into the same folder.
posted by nathan_teske at 5:51 PM on February 20, 2006

When I right click and change the info so that artist, title, composer, blah, blah matches, it still doesn't work. I also verified that the ID3s were the same number.
posted by Brittanie at 6:15 PM on February 20, 2006

I was able to get into my documents folder and drag them into the correct place in the iTunes library folder, but when I relaunch iTunes, the old episodes still show up in the Odeo folder.

A few possible solutions, which may work individually or together. Unclick 'automatically sort my music' (or something along those lines) in the iTunes preferences. That may not work for podcasts, though. So: drag your files into the iTunes library proper and delete the podcast entries (while keeping the files), then set up a smart playlist that matches all the files?
posted by holgate at 1:07 AM on February 21, 2006

None of that has worked. As far as I can tell from the Apple forums, this is an unfixable flaw. I have worked around it with a smart playlist but it's still annoying.
posted by Brittanie at 1:29 AM on February 21, 2006