Q: I bought a whole lot of podcasts from a site called “Instant Anatomy”, which I think goes through Amazon. They sent me the links to the podcasts and I downloaded them and put them on my iPod. But for some reason when I dragged them onto my iPod they got saved in “Recently Purchased Songs”, rather than in Podcasts. How do I move them to podcasts?
– Mara
A: Only podcasts that are downloaded through iTunes directly are automatically tagged as podcasts. Anything else you import manually gets tagged as a music track by default, and therefore appears alongside your normal music.
You can re-assign individual tracks as podcasts simply by changing their “Media Kind” setting, which can be found by selecting a track, choosing File, Get Info from the iTunes menu and then selecting the “Options” tab.
However, you’re probably better off simply subscribing to the podcast series directly in iTunes itself, rather than downloading and importing the episodes separately. You may want to search the iTunes Store to see if you can find the Podcast there—podcasts are available for free through iTunes and the catalog is very extensive. If it’s not in the iTunes Store Podcast Directory, then you can still subscribe to it manually as long as you have a link to the podcast. Simply choose Subscribe to Podcast from the iTunes Advanced menu and a dialog box will appear where you can enter or paste the URL to the podcast.
Once you’ve pasted in the URL and clicked OK, the Podcast should appear in the Podcasts section in iTunes, and new episodes will be downloaded automatically. You can also download older episodes from here by clicking on the “Get” button that appears beside the episode titles.
For more information see our Complete Guide to iTunes Audiobooks, Podcasts + iTunes U.
