How to: Create a smart podcast playlist in iTunes

I picked up Awaken with the recent Macheist deal, and with it I planned to do something I've been thinking about doing for a long time with iTunes: try and figure out a way to wake myself up with a short roundup of the daily podcasts I never seem to find a time to listen to during the day itself.

Getting your Mac to play a playlist on demand at a certain time isn't hard at all (Awaken will do it easily, or Alarm Clock 2 will do it as donationware), but the tough part is getting your podcasts rounded up into a playlist so you can hear all the new shows all in one go. What I wanted to do was create a playlist that contained one of each of the daily podcast shows that iTunes had downloaded for me most recently, and to have that playlist update as the podcasts did, so that every day I had a playlist full of new show episodes set to play one after another.

Easier said than done (and it's not even that easy to say). But I got it done, just by manipulating a few iTunes smart playlists. Here's my short tutorial how.

I have to say first of all that this idea isn't mine-- it came from this post by Cosmonut over on AppleInsider's forums (I found it during one of my many Google searches while trying to figure this out). But here's my explanation of how to do it-- I wasn't able to find an easier way. Basically, what you'll do is make a bunch of different smart playlists for each podcast you want to use, with one show each, and then automatically combine them into one master playlist that will update itself every time a new podcast shows up.

First of all, obviously, you have to subscribe to the podcasts you want to download. I rounded up a few of my favorite daily podcasts, with the plan of putting them all together so I'd have something to listen to as I woke up in the morning.

Next, what you'll want to do is create a Smart Playlist for each of the podcasts you'll want to include in the master playlist. Create a smart playlist, and then set Podcast to "true," (see below for the settings) and change the Album to whatever your playlist's Album is (I had to "Get Info," or ⌘-I, on a few of the shows to figure out what they used for an Album identifier).

Finally (and this is the key), you'll want to check "Limit to," and limit the playlist to one item selected by "most recently added." That will give you a playlist with only one item in it: the most recent show iTunes has downloaded for you.

When you're done with all of this, you'll have a smart playlist for every show you want in the master playlist, and each one will have just one episode (the latest one you've downloaded) in it. For convenience's sake, I put all of these playlists into one folder.

Finally, you can create your master playlist, which is the actual playlist I'm going to have Awaken play for me every morning. To do that, create another smart playlist, and then just put in all the playlists that you've created so far.

And as you can see, since each playlist only has one episode in it (the most recently downloaded), you end up with a master playlist of all the latest episodes of these podcasts. Since all the smart playlists are updated live, when a new podcast gets downloaded, the show's playlist will change, and thus the master playlist will also bring in the new show.

Pretty convoluted for iTunes (although podcast playlist support has never been great anyway). But it does exactly what I wanted to do: put all the latest daily episodes of my selected playlists into one list ready for me to play automatically each morning as I wake up and brew the coffee.

Update: Hessi in the comments makes a good point-- the folder you put the playlists in itself should work as a playlist for the purposes of playing the podcast, so you may not have to create a master playlist at all. But I'm not sure that folders work exactly the same as playlists in all instances (on iPods, during syncing, etc.), so it might be worth creating a separate master playlist anyway.

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I picked up Awaken with the recent Macheist deal, and with it I planned to do something I've been thinking about doing for a long time with...

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Jessica Donadio

Thank you so much for your post!!! Additionally I figured out a way where you could have the playlist play automatically at the same time every day (I tried to do this through Ical, but was unable to understand how I could set an event for the same time every day. I tried to save it as tutto-il-giorno, but it wasn't playing on any days after the date I had set as the start date)

Anyways, if you follow the third script in these instructions,

http://macscripter.net/articles/482_0_10_0_C/

you will be able to make applescript applications that will play your playlist at a specific time...which can likewise function as an alarm that plays in itunes.

April 08 2008 at 6:23 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon Emmons

I found a much simpler way to keep up with my podcasts. Create a smart playlist where Podcast is true and play count is 0. This will play back all unplayed podcasts in the order they arrived and podcasts will disappear from the list as soon as playback completes.

February 01 2008 at 1:32 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Randy Stewart

Oh, and the list is sorted by "Release Date" so that the most current stuff is up at the top.

February 01 2008 at 12:20 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Randy Stewart

So, depending on the kind of podcasts that you listen to, this might be an easier way to accomplish

I set up a smart playlist that uses Podcast=true and then I limit it to a. 14 days and b. 2 gigabytes.

This won't work for your "occasional" podcasts, but for your regular stuff (NPR, Macworld, etc), it does a pretty good job.

One addition, I usually pull out the video podcasts (which don't work in playlists on the iPod Touch anyway, grrrr....) by saying "Kind does not contain QuickTime" or "MPEG-4."

February 01 2008 at 12:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

doog

Hmmm, I'd figure that you'd want to listen to the podcasts in order. Rather than "most recently added", why not "least recently added"? It's like reading chapter two before reading chapter one. Then you can add the "Play Count" is "0" to have it leave the playlist after you have heard it (to be replaced by the next least recently added episode with the next sync.)

I actually have similarly incredibly complicated playlists for music rather than podcasts, so that I can keep my poor little 2 GB Nano refreshed with some new content every time that I sync.

February 01 2008 at 11:31 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

quandmeme

I have recently gone from maintaining separate libraries for my wife and I to synchronizing from one library. That means that artists I never want to hear show up in my smart playlists. (I'm looking at you Celine.) I thought I was embarrassingly nerdy creating intermediate playlists that filtered the artists and then a subset playlist that gives me a ipod nano size chunk of that playlist. I'm glad to know that there are others out there wishing for nested-query playlists.

February 01 2008 at 10:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Lauram

This is really useful, thanks. I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, and it's annoying to have to manually switch to a new one while driving or working out. Now all I need is a "catch up" playlist that will scoop up all my backlogged NPR "most email stories" podcasts!

February 01 2008 at 10:14 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Adam Teece

I've been trying to figure out how to do this for a while now. I really like Awaken's interface, but I got used to this feature on iAlarm before I got Awaken. iAlarm can do this all inside the alarm clock app and it downloads then deletes the podcast transparently without touching iTunes. Glad to see it can be done in Awaken, now it just needs to be built in, which I made a request to the developer to do.

February 01 2008 at 9:46 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

STrRedWolf

Now how can I tell iTunes to refresh podcasts more than once a day at specific times...

February 01 2008 at 9:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to STrRedWolf's comment

Dave

on Mac version: Preference/Podcasts icon. There's a pulldown box for "Check for New Episodes..." You can go hourly, daily, weekly, manually.

I'll bet if you Google around you might find someone's written an automator or AppleScript that would let you be more specific than that.

With Automator, probably pretty easy to just do yourself if you can't find one.

February 01 2008 at 9:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dave

I just recently did this as well, and found the same instructions you did.

Apple could make this SOOOO much easier by just changing the boolean logic from a single ALL/ANY MATCH to adding a AND/OR decision on each line of the Smart Playlist options.

February 01 2008 at 9:30 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply