iTunes 11.2 Podcasts changes

[mattspace]

OK, so I'm stumped. After spending the evening going through Time Machine backups to find random episodes of podcasts that iTunes deleted in the upgrade to 11.2 I can't find an answer:

That's the difference between "My Episodes" and "Saved" episodes?

In the list view, I change the filter between "Unplayed/My Episodes" and "Saved" and the listing of episodes seems to change at random.

I collect podcasts like some people collect comic books. Many of the shows I've got aren't around any more, and no longer have feeds active, so this random loss of files from disk is frankly disturbing.

 

[pmau]

iTunes screwed my podcasts, too.

"My Episodes" are episodes you haven't listened to and told itunes to keep for you with the settings. iTunes will / might delete those.

"Saved Episodes" are locally downloaded and marked not to be deleted.
The "Feed" shows all episodes that are still in the RSS of the podcast.

My confusion starts when "current" episodes and "saved" episodes overlap.
It's hard to tell if an episode will disappear in the future without switching to the Saved view.

All very strange, usability is near zero.

EDIT:

Oh and yes. Once you remove an episode from Saved it is GONE

 

[mattspace]

iTunes screwed my podcasts, too.

Glad (sorta) to hear I'm not the only one.

Noodling around in Time Machine - One of my podcasts went from having 34 episodes on disk prior to the upgrade to 18 over the course of 2 daily backups. None of these were in the trash in Finder, and I'm pretty sure I'd remember manually deleting half the files in a directory.

"My Episodes" are episodes you haven't listened to and told itunes to keep for you with the settings. iTunes will / might delete those.

That doesn't seem to be how it behaves for me - I have episodes that have been played through several times in "Unplayed/My Episodes" but not in "Saved" and yet random blocks of old episodes not showing up in "Saved"

"Saved Episodes" are locally downloaded and marked not to be deleted.
The "Feed" shows all episodes that are still in the RSS of the podcast.

I have all of my episodes set to download, yet for some reason not all the episodes show up in "Saved" - John Gruber's Talk Show for example every second or third episode isn't in "Saved"

My confusion starts when "current" episodes and "saved" episodes overlap.
It's hard to tell if an episode will disappear in the future without switching to the Saved view.

See what I don't get, is what's the difference between "Saved" and downloaded with the settings set to:

Limit Episodes: Off
Download Episodes: On
Delete Played Episodes: Off

Why would I need a separate "Saved" category, and why wouldn't episodes downloaded with the setting to not delete, therefore not be added to "Saved"?

All very strange, usability is near zero.

EDIT:

Oh and yes. Once you remove an episode from Saved it is GONE

Who was the idiot that decided the default behaviour of a changed auto-delete function, would be for it to be ON? That's got to be in the running for the stupidest decision ever in the history of software.

It's absolute madness - the only way I can explain it is those responsible are so spoiled by bandwidth, they just don't use iTunes as an archive system, and so stream everything when they want to hear it.

So here I am, doing something I can scarcely believe - preparing to nuke my iTunes folder and restore it from a backup, and then re-introduce it to iTunes 11.2 and see if I can get it to keep the changed default settings to not delete episodes - as I think that's what's happened - for a day or so I didn't realise auto-delete was the default.

 

[pmau]

I played around a little more.

So, everything I mark as "Saved Episodes" doesn't show up under "My Episodes" anymore.

And if you switch to the "Saved Episodes" view it even stops playing.

If you right-click a saved episode, it offers you "Remove from Saved Episodes" and also "Delete".

The first warns and asks if I want to keep the file, the second one nukes the file immediately.

It's a mess. I think I will delete all episodes, switch to the "Feed" view and re-download the latest three manually.

I hope that I have no "Saved" episodes after that.
Which is a funny name by itself.

 

[aaronvan]

iTunes has single-handedly ruined my podcast listening experience.

Oh look, Apple released 11.2.2 today, another crappy iTunes update.

 

[mattspace]

Looking back on this, having spent an entire day on recovering time machine backups etc, all of these problems could have been avoided with the following changes to the way iTunes shipped:

The default setting for auto delete etc set to:

Delete Played Episodes: Off

And for episodes to be added to "saved" automatically if that setting is set to "Off". It's hardly rocket surgery, if you don't want a played episode being deleted, your intention is to save it.

 

[Planky]

I find the whole podcasts thing to be a complete mess.

I download podcasts to iTunes on my computer and have two iPhones linked to the library, so that my wife and I can both listen to different podcasts and keep them to go back to later.

Now if I delete podcasts from my iPhone it removes them from my wife's iPhone and sometimes from iTunes too! So we both have to have all the podcasts rather than a subset and waste room on our iPhones.

Regardless of the settings in iTunes on which podcasts to synchronise it randomly adds different ones and not necessarily the ones that are selected.

When podcasts were part of the iTunes app it used to work fine. Now it is a bloody confusing mess.

 

[pmau]

In addition, I swear that the Auto Deletion is OFF in iTunes but still the episodes dissapear after listening.

If I go to "Feed", they DO NOT have the cloud symbol, meaning they are physically available on my harddrive.

But they do NOT show up in any other list than "Feed".

The iPhone szenario is also true for me. Whatever I do on my phone directly messes up my iTunes podcasts.

Thanks Apple.

 

[aaronvan]

...and the check-boxes for podcasts that are still in the cloud seems superfluous. If I download it, then show the check-box. Why have it there all the time?

 

[mattspace]

i Have my iPad and phone set with "synchronise podcasts" to off, and iTunes set to only sync checked tracks - I also don't delete or in any way manage podcasts on my iOS devices, just listen, and do all the management on my mac.

What I find impossible to fathom is the mindset in every other podcatcher / player I've looked at, that the way you'd sync podcasts among multiple devices, is to download them afresh separately onto each device.

What I think has happened in iTunes is this:

• The initial tagging of previously downloaded shows as "saved episodes" is flawed - for me it only caught as few as half the episodes in some feeds.

• 
  The default setting to delete after 24 hours then catches all those episodes the move to Saved function missed.

The solution is to go through and manually mark as saved all your episodes. Unfortunately since the list view doesn't offer a filter to show unsaved local episodes without the feed episodes included, you can't just select all your feeds and mark as saved, since it'll then download all the feed episodes as well, and you'll end up with doubles.

The distinction between "Saved Episodes" and "My Episodes" seems to be that "My Episodes" are local files which are effected by the auto-delete settings.

 

[Glassed Silver]

i Have my iPad and phone set with "synchronise podcasts" to off, and iTunes set to only sync checked tracks - I also don't delete or in any way manage podcasts on my iOS devices, just listen, and do all the management on my mac.

What I find impossible to fathom is the mindset in every other podcatcher / player I've looked at, that the way you'd sync podcasts among multiple devices, is to download them afresh separately onto each device.

What I think has happened in iTunes is this:

• The initial tagging of previously downloaded shows as "saved episodes" is flawed - for me it only caught as few as half the episodes in some feeds.

• 
  The default setting to delete after 24 hours then catches all those episodes the move to Saved function missed.

The solution is to go through and manually mark as saved all your episodes. Unfortunately since the list view doesn't offer a filter to show unsaved local episodes without the feed episodes included, you can't just select all your feeds and mark as saved, since it'll then download all the feed episodes as well, and you'll end up with doubles.

The distinction between "Saved Episodes" and "My Episodes" seems to be that "My Episodes" are local files which are effected by the auto-delete settings.

Good Lord, so we have a "local" feed, an online feed (that often only contains a chunk of episodes, because you know... storage on the internet isn't free) and then there's your "saved episodes" that are local and are kept. (hopefully)

Good gracious, this is the exact opposite of Apple's mantra of KISS which often leads to less functionality / more automation (usually in favor of data integrity).

What's more, we get buggy iOS Podcasts apps, buggy synching, random deletions that make no sense considering user settings all but implying he/she wants deletion, a process that could STILL BE asked for in a dialog box...


I use iTunes are a media archive as well and since iTunes 11 I have a very hard time trusting it anymore, what happened when I migrated from iTunes 10 to 11 was nothing short of a data integrity nightmare.


It just works.

Glassed Silver:mac

 

[dunebean]

Solution to lame categories!!

Not sure if this is only valid for the newest 12.1 iTunes, but I found the solution to dealing with these ridiculous categories. On the newest version of iTunes, there is a button on the right of the screen: Podcasts. When clicked, you have the option of switching to Episode List, which gives you the list from previous versions of iTunes and allows you to delete podcasts from your personal feed. I was thrilled to see this option, and wondered if it was not offered in the 11. versions? Don't remember seeing it.

 

[mattspace]

The list view is in iTunes 11 for podcasts, but it functions in a way that lets you see Feed episodes, Saved Episodes, Unplayed & My Episodes, Unplayed & My Episodes & Saved.

It's a UI Clusterf*#k