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I listen to podcasts with an unsupported third-party MP3 player. Which mostly works out great -- it's much cheaper than an iPod and holds just as much with an interface almost as good.

But Apple did one evil thing to sabotage people who download podcasts with iTunes and then don't play them from within iTunes or on a regularly-sync'd iPod.

If iTunes thinks that a podcast has gone unplayed for the last 5 episodes, it stops downloading the podcast. The only indicator that there's a problem is a little gray exclamation point next to the podcast's name in the playlist. If you click on the exclamation point, you'll see this message:

iTunes has stopped updating this podcast because you have not listened to any episodes recently. Would you like to resume updating this podcast?

...And then you have to click a button to tell iTunes that it's okay to resume downloading those podcasts. If you subscribe to a lot of podcasts (as I do) then that's a lot of clicking to do on a regular basis just to keep iTunes doing what it was supposed to be doing all along.

I've come up with a slightly less painful solution. iTunes marks a track as "played" when it has played the very end of the track. So I wrote a script to play each track and jump to its end for every track in a selected playlist.

The script takes a couple of minutes to run through a playlist. But it's a lot easier to remember to run this script once a week rather than having the unpleasant surprise that all of your podcasts have stopped updating and then be forced to click through up to dozens of dialog boxes.

Copy and paste the script into the Script Editor, save it to the /Library/iTunes/Scripts folder and run it by selecting a playlist and then choosing the script from the iTunes Script menu. As a precaution against user-stupidity, the script won't run on the main library.

tell application "iTunes"
play
pause
if name of current playlist is "Library" then error "This script will not run on the main library."

display dialog "Click 'OK' to mark every track in the current playlist as played.

This may take some time..."

set theList to every file track of current playlist

repeat with i from 1 to (count of theList)
try
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {":"}
set trackTime to time of (item i of theList) as string
set trackTime to trackTime as string
set sec_holder to every text item of trackTime as list

if (count of (every text item of sec_holder)) > 3 then
error "Podcast is too Long!"
end if

if (count of (every text item of sec_holder)) = 1 then
set trackTimeSec to (text item 1 of sec_holder) as integer
end if

if (count of (every text item of sec_holder)) = 2 then
set Min to (text item 1 of sec_holder) * 60
set trackTimeSec to (Min + (text item 2 of sec_holder))
end if

if (count of (every text item of sec_holder)) = 3 then
set Hr to ((text item 1 of sec_holder) * 60 * 60) as integer
set Min to (text item 2 of sec_holder) * 60 as integer
set trackTimeSec to Hr + Min + (text item 3 of sec_holder)
end if

play item i of theList
delay 2
set player position to trackTimeSec
delay 2
end try
end repeat

beep
display dialog "Done marking tracks as played."
end tell

This is a highly irritating "feature" that's been screaming for a checkbox in Preferences for several versions now. Sigh.

In the meantime, Wooden Brain's "CastAway" has an option to force iTunes to stop stopping. :) Software is here:
http://www.woodenbrain.com/index-sw.html

...and the relevant option is "Settings" -> "Update each podcast subscription individually" (hover over it and a tooltip will confirm).

The $8 shareware fee is probably worth it if you like the software; it can do much more than just skirt this irritating bug.

Posted by: Brook Jones on December 14, 2007 05:35 AM