Seriously, iTunes?

tazmaniak

Apparently, iTunes has a feature I wasn't aware of. If you haven't listened to an episode of a podcast you're subscribed to within 5 days, iTunes will stop updating it. What?! So iTunes feels that if you let as little as 5 days go by without listening to an episode, that means you no longer want new episodes of that podcast? Whose idea was this? 5 days? They don't even ask you if you no longer want it updated. It's automatic. And if you don't click on that little exclamation point next to the podcast, you wouldn't even know the episodes were no longer updating.

Did anyone else know this? I take a few weeks off from regularly listening to 10 podcasts because I'm watching a lot of TV shows and don't really think much about there not being a lot of podcast episodes showing up. Not every show has a regular schedule and sometimes people go on breaks. Then I notice a lot of the podcasts have a little exclamation point next to them. It tells me it stopped updating because I haven't listened to any recent episodes and wants to know if I want them to resume updating.

Yesterday, I only had 10 episodes that I have yet to listen to. Now I have 55.

Chuck_Melville

I didn't know that, but I don't usually use iTunes to download podcasts, or even subscribe to them. Most of the podcasts I listen to are either from NPR or APM, and they have their own apps for download and play. The few I get from iTunes (like CGS) I don't subscribe to and get on a sporadic basis.

DAR

I knew that and never really thought of it as a big deal.

tazmaniak

No, it's not a big deal, just an annoyance. Especially if you didn't know. I would imagine if you no longer wanted new episodes, you would just unsubscribe. Why does the program decide for you and after only 5 days?

Chuck_Melville

tazmaniak said:

Why does the program decide for you and after only 5 days?

That's actually a good point. What if the podcast you were listening to was a weekly podcast?

Mr_Cosmic

Yes, I knew about it.

Krescan

I only download a few from itunes for when I'm at home and not getting good signal, the rest of them my podcasts come from the stitcher app. But it will only keep the last 5 or so available

DavidAkers

That's a feature added by the same people who wrote software that, when a dialog box is up, cause it to change the focus from the dialog box back to the main program window once per minute, even if you are typing in the box at the time.

DoctorDoom

I miss not having to manually input the podcast information into the "notes" section.

(Copy pasted from the description)

Used to be, what was in the description would automatically show up on the ipod if you wanted it to.

Nick

It does show the exclamation point instead of the blue dot, so you can click it and say keep updating...

Fade2Black

I've known about this embuggerance (though, you aren't entirely correct about the criteria for timing out being 5 days. iTunes stops downloading if it detects that you haven't listened to the last 5 episodes of a given podcast - if it's a daily podcast, then yes, it would be 5 days, but a weekly podcast would timeout in a little over a month).

This auto-termination is especially annoying for those who disable auto-syncing in their iTunes preferences. I listen to podcasts on an old 4GB iPod mini. The thing fills up rather quickly if auto-syncing is turned on, and it's for that reason that I use manual syncing. If one has auto-syncing set to "on", when a person listens to a podcast on his/her iPod, the iPod communicates with iTunes when it's synced, and informs the computer that the podcast has been listened to. This prevents the podcast from timing out. However, when auto-syncing is off, one can listen to the podcast on his/her iDevice, but the computer never registers that the podcast has been listened to, so it assumes the podcast is being ignored. I've seen some scripts that will automatically unsubscribe then resubscribe a user's podcast subscription list, effectively preventing this timeout from occurring. I found the scripts to be more hassle than they're worth, for all too often they would result in my computer re-downloading podcasts I had deleted from my computer.