How To Better Manage Your iPod/iPhone Podcasts

I like to use my iPhone for view­ing pod­casts. How­ever, man­ag­ing them through iTunes leaves much to be desired because some pod­casts I like to view and then trash them, while oth­ers I like to archive and have synced at all times. iTunes does not have an obvi­ous way to set this up.

First, click on your device. Then go to the Pod­casts tab. Sync all unplayed episodes of selected pod­casts and check only those pod­casts you don’t want to sync permanently.

Now for those pod­casts you want to sync per­ma­nently things get a lit­tle com­pli­cated because you also want to auto­mat­i­cally include any new pod­casts when iTunes down­loads them. To accom­plish this you need to setup a Smart Playlist. So cre­ate a new Smart Playlist. For the first rule, set “Pod­cast is true”. For the sec­ond rule, set “Album con­tains” and then type in the name of the pod­cast that is in the album field. This field isn’t on by default so you may want to adjust the View Options so that field is vis­i­ble. Make sure Live updat­ing is checked (default). Once you have your Smart Playlist set up, I rec­om­mend you rename it to the pod­cast name. Also view the playlist to con­firm the Smart List matches the cor­rect pod­casts and sort the playlist the way you want. The iPod/iPhone will keep this sort order.

Once you have all your Smart Playlists setup, click your device again and go to the Music tab. Check Sync music and Selected playlists. Then check off the playlists you want to sync includ­ing the Smart Playlists you cre­ated for your pod­casts. That should do it. Hope­fully, this will improve the way you man­age your podcasts.