Help me leech all of Keith and Girl!

April 28, 2006 3:40 AM

How can I download all episodes of a podcast in iTunes without clicking on each individual "Get" link?

So, I'm heading out on a vacation to sunny Lanzarote next week, and decided I want to pull down some podcasts to listen to while I'm laying on the beach. I've subscribed to a couple new ones, and I was wondering: is there any way in iTunes to download ALL of a specific podcast's episodes with a handy dandy one button press? Or do I have to individually "Get" each and every one?

Seems to me, the easiest thing would be to highlight the ones I want, right click and choose a download option, but iTunes doesn't seem to have that functionality. Any iTunes gurus out there that could help me out?

posted by antifuse to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Ahh, nevermind... I found the "Download all" option in the Podcasts preferences tab.
posted by antifuse at 3:51 AM on April 28, 2006

Nevermind my nevermind - apparently download all only downloads all the new episodes that it finds in a given "check for new podcasts" operation, which apparently doesn't count if you are subscribing to a podcast for the first time. BOOO!
posted by antifuse at 4:29 AM on April 28, 2006

Forgive me if this is obtuse, as I don't really play with podcasts, but can you just go to the site in question and use the dOwnloadthemall Firefox extension? It works wonders if all of the links are on the same page.
posted by OmieWise at 5:35 AM on April 28, 2006

Can you go to "Preferences" and then in the "Podcasts" tab -> "Download all episodes"?
posted by veggieboy at 5:52 AM on April 28, 2006

Well that's the thing. There's no archive pages with individual links to each podcast. The only place they exist, so far as I can tell, is in the podcast RSS feeds.

Oh, and veggieboy: see my first two comments.
posted by antifuse at 6:07 AM on April 28, 2006

Sorry, antifuse. I hate it when people do that, too. Sigh. . . I'm only half awake. Try this:

Once you've subscribed to the podcast already, click the little triangle next to the podcast to collapse the list so that only the title is showing, not the individual episodes. Then, with option key held down (or its PC equivalent, I would assume), click the triangle to expand the list.

This should force a refresh of all available episodes, giving you a list of everything iTunes has for that podcast.

Does this help you at all?
posted by veggieboy at 6:13 AM on April 28, 2006

Also, here's Apple's page of helpful podcast tips for iTunes.
posted by veggieboy at 6:25 AM on April 28, 2006

It's not that the list isn't available... I can see all the episodes of a given podcast. The thing is, I want to be able to download the whole wack of em, and even when I have it set to Download All, it still only downloads the first available one when I subscribe to a new podcast. If I want the rest, I have to hit "Get" individually for each one. I tried alt/ctrl clicking the triangle, and no change... can't seem to find any way to just say "download all available episodes for this podcast" despite that setting. Booo! Hehehe
posted by antifuse at 6:58 AM on April 28, 2006

Hmm. I have the opposite problem. I've got a bunch of podcasts I've subscribed to since after they started, so of eps 1-50 I've got, say, 20-50, with iTunes set to "download all" I often find that it's started up on downloading ep 19, 18 etc, after getting the most recent one. Which is annoying, because I really don't want those ones.

But it doesn't do it all the time, so I've no idea what I'm doing that you're not that causes this behaviour. I'm on WindowsXP SP2 with the most recent iTunes.
posted by tiamat at 7:09 AM on April 28, 2006

I'm on the same one as you, tiamat. Personally, I'd just like to have a "Download all selected" option, which seems like a pretty reasonable feature to me.
posted by antifuse at 7:11 AM on April 28, 2006

OK. Now I understand the problem. This probably won't help you, unfortunately, but for the benefit of Mac-using future searchers, it seems like this script would do the trick. But, yeah, it doesn't seem much too ask to have a "download all selected option."
posted by veggieboy at 8:42 AM on April 28, 2006

Omiewise's solution sucks for one reason: a downloaded MP3 is different from a podcast. A podcast, to iTunes, has bookmark functionality and is associated with a feed. If you have a downloaded MP3, it's not handled in the same way that a podcast is.
posted by tommorris at 12:33 AM on April 29, 2006

tommorris: since I'm listening to these podcasts on my rio karma anyways, I don't really care about the podcast bookmarky features. However, omiewise's suggestion is still useless because there IS no page that lists all the previous podcasts and lets you download them. :)
posted by antifuse at 3:59 AM on May 9, 2006

Actually, in the case of Keith and the Girl, I stand corrected. However, that still doesn't eliminate the problem in general.
posted by antifuse at 4:00 AM on May 9, 2006