I have a lot of podcasts saved on my iTunes. Because I don’t have room for them on my iPod (which is old and almost at capacity), I’ve just always excluded podcasts when I Sync.
Now I want to put one or two podcasts onto my iPod to listen to while I’m walking, but not the zillion and 6 that I have saved. Can somebody please tell me how to put just one (or two, or three) of my hundreds of podcasts onto an iPod and, after I’ve listened to it, how do I take it off again?
Thanks for any info. (It will be a few hours before I can try it so please forgive seeming rudeness if I don’t acknowledge and thanks in a timely manner.)
You’ve got automatic syncing on, I take it. (Munch’s advice would work if you had selected the “Manually manage music and videos” option.) This makes things a little more complicated.
Here’s what to do if you have automatic syncing on (i.e., if when you plug in your iPod, it automatically syncs with your computer.) I’m using a Mac here, but I assume that the instructions on a PC are similar. In iTunes, with your iPod plugged in, select your iPod from the “Devices” column on the left-hand side. On the screen that pops up in the iTunes window, select the “podcasts” tab. Check “Sync Podcasts”, and then uncheck “automatically sync all …” This will cause a couple of scroll windows to appear, where you can select which podcasts episodes you want on your iPod. When you click “Sync”, they’ll automatically be copied over.
Alternately, you can set it up so that the most recent (or 2 or 5 or 10 most recent) episodes of any or all podcasts get automatically copied over to your iPod when you sync. That’s what that second check box at the top is for (the one I originally told you to leave unchecked.)
One thing I do is to just make a playlist of the 2 or 3 podcasts I want and only sync that playlist under the “podcasts” tab. Then I don’t have to go selecting or checking or un-checking. I just fiddle with the playlist.
If you have an older, low capacity ipod, why are you syncing it in the first place? Maybe you have a really small music library. But if you don’t, I’d think it’d be far easier to just manually manage the music, and drag/drop anything you want to add or subtract from your ipod going forward - especially if the only thing that routinely changes is just the stray podcast or two.
You’re probably right. When I first got an iPod it was a gift and I didn’t even have iTunes yet, so syncing was no problem, but now of course it’s 10 times the capacity of the iPod.