Managing music and podcasts with iTunes
This is kind of a gripe.
I have a “All Podcasts” smart playlist here at work. I noticed that the Podcasts were taking up about 14.5GB of drive space and I needed that space to do work. The smart playlist is an OR rule which looks like this:
This isn’t the playlist I sync with my iPod, however. That one is called “New Podcasts” and looks like this:
These rules are joined by an AND condition, which allows me to only see the “All Podcasts” I haven’t heard (“Play Count” is 0) and discard stuff that’s too old (“Date Added” is in only the last 8 days).
Lots of iPodder clients now come with functionality which allows you to manage the amount of space used by automatically deleting old whows. I think iPodderX even has a feature that allows you to re-download a deleted file via it’s original URL.
I might want to start taking advantage of that feature, but for now I had to deal with it manually and iTunes gave me grief. iTunes doesn’t allow you to delete files when you’re viewing them in a Playlist. The only time the delete option is available is if you’re looking at your root Library.
Anyway, I had to export the songs to a text file. Luckily, I was able to rename the file Songs.csv (comma-separated value) and launch it in Microsoft Excel. The filename was extracted into it’s own column. I copied that column into a new file which I renamed “deletesongs.bat” and replaced “D:\” with “del “D:\”. I had to surround the filename in quotes. I ran the batch file and all of my podcasts were deleted. However, iTunes still lists the files, but they are marked as missing. Arg,
It would have been so much easier if I could just use the smart playlist to create a special list of podcasts which I could easily delete.
Why should I have to rely on third party software to do that?