I just downloaded some radio shows that I want to have appear in the podcast directory on iTunes but I can’t do it. The only thing I can think of is changing the genre to “podcast” but that didn’t do anything. I looked online and I couldn’t find anything useful. I have a Mac.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a complete answer, but I might be able to point you in the right direction. Note: this is from my experiences with iTunes on Windows, but I don’t think it deals with any system-specific info.
From what I can tell, the “Podcast” files get sorted there due to a set of ID3 tags on the files. IIRC (I’m on my work machine, so I can’t check directly), there are four or five of them, named “ITUNES_PODCAST_", where the "” are things like the cast’s URL, download date, etc. When these tags exist, iTunes sets the “media type” of the file to Podcast (and then locks it so it’s not user-editable) and the files show up under the Podcast category.
I’ve been able to go in the opposite direction of what you want (moving files from Podcasts to the general Music category) by using a third-party tag editor (Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)) to strip off those PODCAST tags. I’d assume that if you added those tags, iTunes would sort the files into Podcasts.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they provide a Mac version of that program. If you find one, you can use it to examine existing podcast files to see how the tags are set for those, then do something similar on the radio shows you want to make podcasts.
I don’t think you can do that. The Podcast folder isn’t meant for permanent content; it’s intended for content associated with an RSS feed, which it sounds like the files you downloaded don’t have.
Robin