iTunes stopped podcast

I love having podcasts on my iPhone. And some of my favorites are from G4TV and Attack of the Show. I definitely don’t catch every episode, but when I’m in the mood to be entertained I want it to be there. The other day I opened up my podcast section on my iPhone and noticed that non of them where up to date. “I just synced my phone the other day” I thought. When I got back to my computer I noticed that iTunes had stopped updating my podcasts because I wasn’t watching them. But I was watching them on my iPhone. Who gives iTunes the right to stop updating? My TiVo doesn’t stop recording shows just because Im not watching. On top of that, there is no setting in iTunes to turn this feature off.

Well, once I noticed that Apple is being unresponsive to the publics numerous Apple Forum postings on this subject, I began a quest to fix it myself. er, well, find someone who fixed it that is, and solve my problem.

Doug over at dougscripts.com is my Hero of the day. He wrote a simple applescript that makes iTunes update all of its podcasts. With an iCal event set to run this script twice weekly, I hope to never be left with old content on my iPhone.

Here is what I did:

1. Download Doug’s script:
Update Expired Podcasts v2.0

There are instructions given by Doug on how to install. The short of it is to place the script in [your user folder]/Library/iTunes/scripts If the scripts folder doesn’t exist, create one.

2. Open iCal and double click on today to start a new event.

I set mine to run early in the day. Choose repeat, then Custom, and set it to run twice a week.

Under attachments select “Add File” and navigate to [youruserfolder]/Library/iTunes/scripts/Update Expired Podcasts

select done and your iCal will run the script twice weekly to keep your podcasts flowing.

I suggest you limit how many podcasts iTunes keeps by changing the “Episodes to Keep” setting in iTunes podcast settings. Mine is set to “Last 3 Episodes”. Then your hard drive wont fill up on you. However I have noticed this setting does not always work properly, so keep an eye on it.