How does an iPhone know which mp3s are podcasts

iphoneitunesmp3podcasts

I recently got an iPhone, and quickly found I would rather use the Zune software instead of iTunes. So I turned on the manual syncing, and I can just drag the mp3 files I want over to the iPhone in iTunes. The problem is that some podcast mp3s show up in the podcast section and some do not. It wouldn't really matter except that only podcasts save their play position.

So the question is: how does an iPhone know which mp3s are podcasts? I assume it's a certain field in the ID3 tag, but I don't know which.

Edit: I found a solution for me. I had iTunes watch my Zune podcast folder. So when I launch iTunes, it seems to figure out all those files are podcasts. I can drag them over to the iPhone and they work as intended.

Best Answer

I think that the way that iTunes separates out podcasts in the Library has to do with how podcasts are synced. Podcast are handled differently than Mp3s.

I just dug into the iTunes Music Library.xml and saw that on podcasts, the following elements appear under podcasts

<key>Podcast</key><true/>

So it has to to with the fact that iTunes flags podcasts as such, and know to handle them differently.

UPDATE: Also, its more than just that key-value pair on the podcast entry, because if you add that key-value pair to any song, it gets removed by iTunes when you close it

UPDATE 2: I also found the entry specifying the Podcast "playlist"

    <dict>
        <key>Name</key><string>Podcasts</string>
        <key>Playlist ID</key><integer>11896</integer>
        <key>Playlist Persistent ID</key><string>6D71FCACB79A978D</string>
        <key>Distinguished Kind</key><integer>10</integer>
        <key>Podcasts</key><true/>
        <key>All Items</key><true/>
        <key>Playlist Items</key>
        <array>
            <dict>
                <key>Track ID</key><integer>7194</integer>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>Track ID</key><integer>7192</integer>
            </dict>
            <dict>
                <key>Track ID</key><integer>7190</integer>
            </dict>
        </array>
    </dict>

Long story short, iTunes is doing a lot of work in the background!!

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