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iTunes always stops at the end of each track in a podcast, forcing you to manually queue up the next one by hand. This is all well and good for longer podcasts like the stackoverflow one, but for the NPR podcasts, which are generally ~5 minutes long, it would be nice if it could play through them like a normal playlist.

Is this possible to do? I haven't found any configuration option anywhere allowing this?

4 Answers 4

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Create a New Smart Playlist. "Match all the following rules": "Podcast is true", then hit the plus sign to add another rule: "Play Count is 0." Make sure "Live Updating" is checked, then click OK. Name it something appropriate like "Unplayed Podcasts." Using this method will play one podcast after another without user intervention. I hope this helps.

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  • I've been doing this for years now, and it's great. One strange thing, though, is that if you have your iPod set to shuffle songs by default, it won't work. You have to turn off shuffle, play the Podcast playlist, and then turn it back on (or use "Shuffle songs"). Jul 18, 2009 at 12:04
  • I just did it on iTunes 9, Windows 7 and the first step was "Media Kind" "is" "Podcast", the rest was the same. Just thought I'd update your answer. +1 for the info, I finally found a lazy solution for this!
    – Eugene
    Mar 3, 2010 at 8:35
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IIRC, I saw this behavour on my iPod when I had the Shuffle setting turned on. Might be worth turning it off in iTunes, in case it does the same thing.

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Not sure about in iTunes, but on the iPod, if you click Play on the Podcast "group" title rather than the individual podcast itself, it will play them all in order. Maybe a similar thing can be done inside iTunes.

Edit: I'm not sure I was completely clear - on my iPod, I go to Pocasts, highlight the one I want (without clicking into it), and then press Play.

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One other trick is to sort the shows by length. You can pound through the short shows pretty quickly then.

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  • Not necessarily. Some podcasts are the same length as songs.
    – Eugene
    Mar 3, 2010 at 8:36
  • Select type Podcast, sort by length. I pound through about 40+ hours of podcasts a week this way. I also keep about 20 or so hours of music on my iPod as well. Yes, this works great.
    – Mike Wills
    Mar 8, 2010 at 17:09

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