Update: It turns out that the way I’ve been creating the smart playlist, with “Genre = Podcast”, which worked for years now, suddenly stopped working. Changing it to “Media Kind is Podcast” and making it sync under the Podcast tab worked.
Thanks to the latest iPod and iTunes updates from Apple, the iPod, the very device that “Podcasts” are named after, has become useless for listing to podcasts the way I want to listen to them.
The way I like to listen to podcasts is in the car, while driving, a time when I probably shouldn’t be poking around the screen of my iPod instead of watching the road. But Apple, in its infinite wisdom, made podcasts different from music or audiobooks in that you can’t (by default) click “Play” on them and listen to them one after the other. Instead, you have to pick one, hit play, and when it’s done, find another one, hit play, and lather, rinse and repeat. Until a few days ago, I had a very nice work-around: I made a Smart Playlist that contained “Genre = Podcast + Playcount = 0”. It worked great.
But now there is a new update for the iPod and iTunes, and they’ve broken it. The playlist still shows, and I can still play it in iTunes and it plays all the way through and the ones you listen to remove themselves from the playlist. Beautiful. But even though that playlist is still checked to sync to the iPod, the playlist doesn’t show up anywhere on the iPod. So how the fuck am I supposed to listen to an hour and forty five minutes of podcasts, some of which are only 3 or 4 minutes long, without spending time poking around on my screen instead of watching where I’m driving?
Maybe it’s time to find a podcast app for my Palm Pre.