As the owner of a Mac and an iPhone, I've naturally been using iTunes as my podcasting program. It works pretty well, except for one huge problem: if it determines that I haven't been listening to podcasts for a while it stops downloading them. Is there any way to force iTunes to continue downloading podcasts regardless of how often I listen to them? For most it isn't a big deal, but there are some (like "This American Life") that only publish one episode at a time so it's impossible to download the ones that you've missed.
This would also be useful to set up an iTunes server that shares the podcasts over the local network – since the podcasts would be listened to remotely, their "new" status would not be changed.
I poked around com.apple.iTunes.plist to no avail – if there is a setting to disable it, it's not labelled in there.
One idea I had would be possibly trying to fool iTunes into thinking that the podcast was listened to recently, as one of the criteria for automatically unsubscribing is that it hasn't been listened to in 5 days. Would it be possible to periodically set this value to the current time? Or might it even accept a future time so it doesn't have to be periodically set?
Best Answer
There is an Applescript called "Update Expired Podcasts" at dougscripts.com.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=updateexpiredpodcasts
You can run this automatically via your crontab or launchd using osacript: