Podcast Tip: Continuous Listening
dan September 9th, 2005
If you listen to your podcasts on an iPod, you may have noticed something a little annoying about how the player handles them. Podcasts are listed in their own “Podcasts” item in the Music menu and under the Podcasts menu, each podcast is listed and under the individual podcast menu, the individual episodes are listed. The episode listening looks almost like a playlist, so you might think that listening to podcast episodes would be like listening to a playlist. What I quickly discovered, however, is that once the iPod finishes playing the podcast episode you selected, it kicks you out of the podcast menu back to the main menu. This has been annoying for me, as I often listen to my podcasts while I walk and so every time that a podcast I’m listening to ends, I have to stop walking, pull the iPod out of my pocket and go through all the menus to find and select the next podcast episode.
If you have found this to be as annoying as I have, you’re in luck. I’m going to outline two different ways that you can get around this and have your podcasts play continuously from one episode to the next.
1) Use On-The-Go
The On -The-Go playlist is one of the more obscure iPod features. Many of the iPod owners that I have spoken with do not know how to use it, or that it even exists. On-The-Go is a way of creating new playlists on your iPod without having to go through iTunes. Once you have created a playlist, you can save it and then rename it later in iTunes.
The way it works is, you find a song that you want to add to the playlist and highlight it. Then, you press and hold the select button until the highlighting around the selected song blinks. You repeat this process for every song that you want in the new playlist. Once you have selected all the songs you want, you can listen to the new playlists by finding the On-The-Go playlist in the Playlists menu. At the bottom of the list of songs, there are two options, one to save the playlist and one to clear it.
So, if you have a few podcasts that you would like to have play in order, use this method to add them to an On-The-Go playlist. Highlight each in turn and then press and hold down on the select button until they blink. Then, when you’re ready to start listening, just go to the On-The-Go playlist and hit play. If you have your computer set to automatically delete podcasts that you have listened to, this list will keep only the episodes that you haven’t heard yet.
One final tip, the episodes of a podcast are listed in reverse chronological order under the Podcasts menu. Since the On-The-Go playlist plays songs in the order they are added to the list, if you want to listen to your episodes in chronological order, add them to On-The-Go starting at the bottom of the episode list and working up towards the top.
2) Make a smart playlist
Smart playlists are the playlists that have the little purple icon (the one that has a little gear or flower inside it) to the left of their name in iTunes. A smart playlist uses rules that you can specify decide which songs are part of the list. This is in contrast to a regular “dumb” playlist, where every song in the list has to be added by you, the user. I won’t go into all of the details of creating rules for smart playlists here. That could take a while, as they are really quite powerful. If you’re interested in learning how they work, I’d recommend just playing around with them and see what types of rules you can create.
There are many smart playlists that you could create to listen to your podcasts continuously. I’m going to present just two of those ways and let you play around to find others that you might find helpful. The first way is to create a general Podcast smart playlist. To do that, go to the file menu and select “New Smart Playlist”. In the dialog box that appears make sure that the “Match the following rule” box is checked. Then select “Genre” in the first selection box, “contains” in the next and write “Podcast” in the text box. Make sure that the “Limit to” and “Match only checked songs” boxes are not checked and that the “Live updating” box is checked. When you are done, the dialog box should look like this:
Finally, click OK and your new smart playlist will appear with your other playlists. Change the name to be whatever you want.
If you would like to have a separate playlist for some or all of your podcasts, you can do that by following the steps above except, after you have put in the information for the first rule in your smart playlist, click on the plus (+) button next to the rule to add another. For this rule, select “Name”, then “contains” and then write in the name of the podcast that you want to have in this playlist. For example, I created a smart playlist for the MuggleCast, as you can see here:
Here you can see my smart playlist in action, keeping track of all my MuggleCasts:
Smart playlists update themselves, so once you’ve created one, it will always be up to date. As podcasts are added to and deleted from iTunes, they will be added to and removed from these lists.
One more thing you should do, though, is make sure that you add these playlists to the list of playlists that get synchronized to your iPod automatically. Now you will always have playlists that contain your podcasts so you can listen to these lists and hear your episodes continuously.
This was an awesome article and exactly what I was looking for. Thankyou so much for the suggestion. Can’t believe that itunes doesn’t include a simple play on button. Maybe itunes 6.5. Again thanks for the tip.
Tom
Yes, this was exactly what I was looking for, as well. I don’t know why I didn’t think of a smartlist; I suppose it hadn’t quite hit home for me yet that all tracks that came in through feeds were given the “Podcast” genre.
I know this article is kind of old, but I wanted to leave my thanks. So thanks!
Thanks! I was looking for this. I don’t want to fool around with the iPod while driving. I just did a Yahoo search for “podcast continuous”, and presto! — I found your very helpful article.
Thanks again,
David
Thanks!..
this is exactly what i am searching for.. but my i hate on-the-go play list, as i have to add every song to it individually.. i hope smart play list will help me.
This no longer seems to work with iTunes 7. You can’t even select a smart playlist that contains only podcasts and press play. You have to go into the smart playlist and pick a podcast and then it will play only that podcast. Lame, lame, lame, lame.
This seems to work in iTunes 7: Make a smart playlist with “Match the following rule” – “Podcast” – “is true”. All podcasts now appear in this smart playlist and iPod continues with the next podcast after the previous has ended.
I read that it wasn’t working with iTunes 7… Worked great for me! Smart Playlist with Genre > is> podcast and my podcasts appeared and play continuously!
My podcast continuous play (on both the Mac and the iPod) stopped some time ago. I had a smart playlist for the last couple of years to overcome this with no problems but that no longer works. Since it appears to work for some and not others on this board, any ideas on what to try?
I use iTunes 7 also. I was experiencing this issue also. My issue came down to the fact that my iPod was set to Shuffle bu SONG. Most Podcasts are set to “Skip When Shuffling” in the “Get Info” for the Podcast. I resolved it by going to the main menu on my iPod > Settings > Shuffle=OFF.
Hope this helps.
Continuous play for Podcasts on Ipod…
Found a lot of people having this same problem, here it goes. I just spent a while trying to figure out how to get multiple podcasts to play sequentially on my Ipod without kicking back out to the main menu. After poking around for a while I found …
Continuous play using Smart Playlists works fine for all music in iTunes 7, but on my iPod it only works for regular music, not Podcasts. What the F*?!?! Seems like they would have to screw this up on purpose. Jeers…
Correction, it DOES seem to work on the iPod, but only if Shuffle is set to Off when you start playing the Playlist. Try this on your iPod:
Make a smart playlist of Podcasts in iTunes and load it onto your iPod.
Set iPod’s shuffle to “Songs”.
Start playing any song in the Playlist and it will start playing “1 of 1″ (not continuous).
Do the same thing but set iPod’s shuffle to “Off”.
This time it will display “## of ##” (continuous play). At this time, you can go back and set the shuffle to “Songs” and it will start shuffling.
What a hack. This only has to be done for playlists of Podcasts, not regular music from iTunes library ripped from CDs. Weird.
THANK YOU! While listening to Podcasts in the car, I’d have to pull over to select a new one when the first one played through. I was ready to go back to my iPod Shuffle, which doesn’t have this problem. Thanks for posting a workaround for this thoroughly annoying problem.
Whew! Can’t believe it took me so long to find this tip. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong when the continuous play feature disappeared.
I too use my iPod when walking or working around the house. Actually, the dirty little secret about iPods is that they are difficult to use if you are on the go. FF is impossible without looking at the device as is moving from one function to another.
Thanks so much for the tips. You’ve cured one of the most irritating aspects of my life.
You’re amazing, I can’t believe I didn’t just think to make a playlist. But thank you fellow blogger.
Thanks so much… this always annoyed me when I was trying to listen to podcasts at work and had to manually start the next one. I was actually listening directly to iTunes from my work computer, but the same issue was there; using a smart playlist does the trick. Thanks again for the insight.
I kept using this trick for months. Since 2 weeks my playlist stops after every podcast. Is this a bug in a new version? Does anyone else have this problem?
Hi!
Perfect work!
I like it!
Brilliant! I listen to the podcasts while I’m quilting, and getting up every 20-30 minutes is disruptive. What I’m really curious about, is that they USED to play continuously. Most upgrades downgrade something, I guess.
I haven’t had a chance to test this yet, but I was wondering– if you don’t have your podcasts set to be deleted after listening, do they stay on the playlist after you’ve heard them?
OMG. I cant beleive that this workaround is necessary. i’m using iTunes 8x. I hope version 9 solves this!!!
Good tips- but what if I want my iPod to do the opposite? I just bought the 160gb iPod. My 80gb would go back to the previous page after finishing a podcast episode; my 160gb plays them as a playlist instead, which I *don’t* like. I haven’t found any kind of setting to change either in my iPod or in iTunes. Does anyone know if I can disable that feature? Keep in mind I’m not very technically-inclined, so step by step instructions would be helpful.
Thanks!
-Alicia
allywag67@aol.com
http://www.thewagband.com
http://www.mariasguides.com/2006/09/26/podcast-playlists-no-longer-play-continuously/
Found another way to fix this.
[...] of system to use,” then Apple has provided an intuitive way to overcome this problem. This blog post describes the solution. I mean, who wouldn’t have thought to create a “Smart [...]
I have a slightly different solution.
In iTunes, select the podcasts you are downloading to your iPod. Right-click on the podcast and choose “Get Info”. Under “Options”, change Media Kind from Podcast to Audiobook. (You can do this for multiple podcasts, if you wish).
Once you say OK, the podcast(s) will move from your iTunes Podcast folder to your Audiobook folder. They can then be imported to your iPod as Audiobooks.
Note that this must be done before the files are imported to your iPod. Once they have been brought over, you will not be able to change the Media Kind field (it will be grayed out).
The drawbacks: if the podcasts are not named with their series of origin (e.g. all podcasts from PC Mag Radio begin with “PC Mag Radio: in their Title field), then you will need to edit the title to give them a common prefix. This can be done either before or after you import them.
The advantages: Audiobooks will flow from one to another without going back to the root menu. Also Audiobooks can be played back at a faster or slower rate (about 1/4 faster or slower than the original). Click the centre button until you get to a screen that says “speed…normal” and use the wheel to select Faster or Slower.
ADDITIONAL TIP: If you want to add all of the episodes of a particular podcast to the On-the-go playlist, then instead of doing it episode by episode, you can hold down the select button on the folder itself and it will add all of the episodes at once to the playlist.