Under iTunes, Podcast handling is (mostly) an inspired technology. Podcasts are handled slightly differently to normal audio, or Music files, and differently again to AudioBooks, and Movies. All of which makes perfect sense, as all of these types of files have different purposes. For most people, a Podcast is something they might listen to once, and then discard.
I’m not most people. I’m a hoarder, and thus I like to keep of the Podcasts I’ve downloaded. And I like them to be well organised. That means all properly tagged, with reasonable titles. I may want to listen to a particular Podcast again, such as the amazing 000 Emergency episode of Radio Eye (from Radio National), or burn it to a CD to play for students in a class.
I’ve also found some MP3 files that are part of a particular Podcast, but have long since been removed from the RSS feed that tell iTunes what files are available. I’ve downloaded these, but needed to be able to get them into iTunes, and make sure they appear in the relevant Subscription. I’ve discovered a way to do this, but at this stage it is a manual process, and can become quite time consuming with many files.
You will need the following things to be able to perform this trick nicely:
- All of the music files you intend to import.
- A copy of the XML file that is the basis of the subscription.
- The hostname and path of the subscription.
- An http server.
- The ability to change hostnames, so as to cause software to look in a particular place for a server, rather than using DNS.
I’ve done all of this on a Mac, and the instructions below will reflect this. It is possible to do all of this on other systems, but the steps may vary, especially redirecting the requests to your own server. A note will be made of this.
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