Exploit iTunes inconsistencies

I have two big problems with playing podcasts:

1. One track finishes and the next starts automatically.
2. One track finishes and the next doesn’t start automatically.

It’s all contextual — sometimes I’m doing a 5 minute task and want a 5 minute podcast as background. It’s a pain when I just don’t quite jump up in time to prevent the next track from starting automatically. This tends to happen when I’m playing an item from a playlist, such as my ‘not yet listened to’ smart playlist, or my ‘Radio NZ’ playlist.

At other times, such as yesterday, I’m doing a task like washing the dishes. I don’t know how long it will take and definitely don’t want to be jumping up to start the next track, and the next. Yet, if I listen to (or watch) podcasts downloaded through iTunes and in the Podcasts section of the Library they jolly well stop at the end of each track.

So the trick is to pick your source carefully. If you want to catch just one single track, play it from the Podcasts section of the Library. When it’s finished, play will stop.

If you want a series of podcasts that just keep on going until you manually stop play, then grab a bunch of podcasts and drag them into a playlist. I now have a playlist called ‘dishes’, just for this purpose: start the first one playing and the rest will just follow on. Delete played items from the list once the session’s over.

While I used to be very annoyed at this iTunes inconsistency in whether or not to play the next podcast, now I see it as a feature.