Folder with nothing but 0 byte files is using 4.3 GB of space

[Morac]

I'm very confused about the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia folder. When I was using Daisy Disk to find folders taking up a large amount of space, this folder showed up as using 4.3 GB being filled with seventy-nine 65 MB files. Yet if I open that folder in Finder all the files show as 0 bytes as does the folder itself. The files in question (all .mp3) cannot be opened.

The oldest file in this folder is from September 16 (the day I installed MacOS 15) and it appears that each day there is about 20 files. Basically more and more 0 byte files are being added to the folder. They don't seem related to PodCasts despite being in the PodCasts container folder since I never run PodCasts on my Mac.

There are no hidden files in the folder that I can tell. Doing a "ls -al" in the terminal shows exactly the same number of files as Finder and all 0 bytes, yet "du -h ." shows 4.3 GB.

Any idea what this folder is and why it appears to be using 4.3 GB of space despite all the files in it being empty?

 

[Morac]

I appear to have solved this by deleting the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts folder.

 

[Morac]

The files came back on November 20, the day after I installed MacOS 15.1.1. In addition to the 0 byte files, there are some mp3 files in there that have a size. I was able to play them and they are all what sounds like radio ads. So for some reason that folder is filling up with 4 GB of ads. I don't even use the Podcast app so I have no idea where these are coming from.

 

[mintier_]

I'm experiencing this as well. Daisy Disk says the StreamedMedia folder is taking up 20.9 GB, with a bunch of 62 MB files along with a bunch of files ranging from 215 MB to 230 MB.

 

[ignatius345]

I don't know the answer to the phantom space issue, but both on my phone and Mac I've had to go in and deliberately tell Podcasts to not save tons of episodes of everything. The settings by default seem to be to aggressively cache episodes, and it's a huge space waster.