Recently I purchased an iPod Touch as a replacement MP3 player. With my previous MP3 player I had become accustomed to downloading specific podcasts, such as the Radio National podcasts, to the computer and then connecting the MP3 player to download the podcasts. This has proven to be a good method, as I can take a good link at the Radio National story that goes with the podcast before downloading it, not to mention that the Radio National website provides plenty of information on each podcast to inform this decision. However, I am finding that the iPod Touch does not allow this method of operation. For podcasts I need to use iTunes and accept push technology to download a whole set of programs in the general area of interest. Then, in order to play a particular podcast, I need to scroll through a series of dated programs in that general area of interest and have no way to judge whether a podcast is of sufficient interest before playing (as the iPod screen does not seem to provide much information about particular podcasts). How can I get the iPod Touch to do what we want - individual podcasts, rather than what it wants to give us, which is a suite of poorly described push jumble podcasts.

This is an interesting question since it somewhat goes against the grain of how most users find iTunes and the iPod devices. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing since often new ways of doing things seem overly complicated, particularly when we are used to doing things a different way. While the iTunes way may seem like a very round-about way to upload files onto your iPod, it has been designed to be as simple as possible and eliminate the need to manually download files from a website and then upload them onto the iPod. For clarification, from this point onwards when we refer to a “podcast” that means “a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically” (to quote Wikipedia’s definition of a podcast - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast). As you can see, podcasts have different episodes which are the individual audio files released periodically. We are not just discussing the semantics of podcasts for the sake of discussion, but instead this comes back to the way that iTunes has setup the downloading of podcasts. The idea being that you subscribe to a particular podcast. When you subscribe to a podcast, iTunes assumes that you wish to listen to all the episodes in that podcast, a bit like making the decision to watch a TV series – you generally want to watch all the episodes in the series. If you don’t like the podcast then you will stop listening and unsubscribe, but like a TV series you generally won’t pick and choose the particular episodes that you wish to watch (or listen).

This system generally works well when a podcast has episodes which relate to each other, like a radio serial or a podcast which only concerns one very specific topic (such as Mac technology, as is the case with the MacBreak Weekly podcast). However, when you have a podcast such as Radio National, which can cover a whole range of different topics (ranging from arts and culture through to science and sport) this becomes more difficult, since it is likely that quite a few of the episodes will not rate your attention and you therefore would prefer to skip those and not download them. That said, Radio National have done a good job of alleviating this issue by splitting their podcasts into categories. For example, searching for Radio National on iTunes will show a whole range of different podcasts such as “Environment – ABC Radio National” and “Books – ABC Radio National”. This means that if you are only interested in one particular topic then you can just subscribe to the podcast which concerns that particular topic. That said, you may still find that there are various episodes within the podcasts which do not interest you yet iTunes will automatically download those episodes. Additionally, you may be interested in all Radio National podcasts but don’t wish to listen to all the episodes within each podcast – just the ones which particularly interest you. You will be glad to hear that there are some methods to resolve this issue (which may even be more convenient than the manual system you have been using previously) and we will now look at these potential workarounds.

On opening iTunes go to the “iTunes Store” in the left-hand pane and in the top bar search for “Radio National”. Scroll down to see the “Podcasts” section. Click the “See All” link next to the heading to show all podcasts with Radio National in the title or description. As discussed, you will see different podcasts concerning different broad topics such as science, business and health. Click either the thumbnail or the title of the podcast which interests you (such as “Education – ABC Radio National”) and a new page will load showing all of the episodes for that podcast. You can find out more information about each episode by hovering over the “i” icon next to the description field which will show a tool-tip with a short description of the episode. If you wish to download that episode then click the “Free” button under the “Price” column heading which will immediately commence downloading that episode to your computer. Then, next time you connect and sync your iPod, it will automatically copy that episode across. This should hopefully give you the best of both worlds – the ability to selectively download episodes and then easily sync them across to your iPod, without the need to double-handle the file (i.e. download the file from the Radio National podcast website and then manually copy it across to your MP3 player).

It is also possible that you may wish to subscribe to particular podcasts since you find that you listen to those particular podcasts more often, and don’t want to have to manually search for the podcast each time you wish to check for new episodes. However, the problem (as you have mentioned) is that if you subscribe to the podcast, iTunes will automatically download new episodes as they are released. Fortunately we can stop this from happening. As the first step, subscribe to a podcast of your liking by clicking the “Subscribe Free” button for the podcast. A message will appear informing you that new episodes will automatically download – don’t worry, we will fix this so it’s not the case. Proceed by clicking the “Subscribe” button. Be aware, this will download the latest episode in the podcast (there is nothing we can do about this, but presumably if you subscribe to that podcast the most recent episode is likely to be of interest). Once you have subscribed, go to the “Podcasts” section in the sidebar and at the bottom of the window click the “Settings…” button. Next to the “Settings for” label, select “Podcast Defaults” and for the “When new episodes are available” select “Do nothing”. This will now prevent new episodes from automatically downloading. Additionally, if you do not wish to keep episodes which you have listened to, then for the “Episodes to keep” setting, select “All unplayed episodes”. Now only episodes which are unplayed will be retained.

New episodes will now not automatically download. However, new episodes will appear when they are available. This means that you can go into the “Podcasts” section in iTunes to view the podcasts to which you have subscribed and selectively pick and choose the episodes that you wish to download by clicking the “Get” button. You can also view a short description of a particular episode by highlighting the row for the episode and then clicking the “i” button that appears at the end of that row. Once you download the episode, then just like individually downloading episodes from the iTunes Store, next time you connect and sync the iPod, the newly downloaded episodes will be automatically copied across to the iPod.

You will notice that in the settings we just modified we elected to change the settings for “Podcast Defaults”. If you want to override these default settings for a particular podcast (for example, if you do wish to automatically download new episodes for a particular podcast) then instead of selecting “Podcast Defaults”, select the particular podcast for which you wish to adjust the settings and untick “Use Default Settings”. You can then override the settings for that particular podcast.

Once the episode has been downloaded onto the device unfortunately there isn’t a particularly easy way to read a synopsis of the episode. The only way is to play the episode and then single-tap on the podcast artwork that displays on the screen when playing the episode. This will result in an overlay window opening, providing a short description of that episode of the podcast. Interestingly though, if you decide that you do not wish to listen to the episode, or you have finished listening to the episode and wish to delete it from the iPod, then in the list of podcast episodes, swipe from the right to the left on the episode row and that will reveal a “Delete” button allowing you to delete that episode of the podcast from the iPod.

As you can see, while the way which iTunes manages the iPod content may seem a bit different to how it has been done previously, it is possible to manage it on a more granular level and it should also hopefully make things a bit simpler rather than having to double-handle a lot of files and also manually download the podcast episodes from the web. Be aware, there are various utilities on the web which purport themselves as iTunes replacements (in some cases, allowing you to directly manage the files on the iPod rather than go through iTunes). However, I would strongly recommend against using any such utilities and instead stick with using iTunes. While it may seem a bit different, using another (non-recommended) method to manage the content on the iPod will make things much more difficult in the future when you wish to upgrade the software on the device. Additionally, you will miss out on some of the big advantages of having an iPod Touch such as the ability to load apps onto the device. Therefore, keeping with the standard software designed for the purpose is always a good idea.