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Dan asks: QuestionI have a subscription in iTunes 7 to a Stanford U podcast that isn’t a podcast, but a series of actual music. Crazy, I know. The problem is iTunes is gosh-darned determined that these are not songs but podcasts. Regardless of what metadata I change in iTunes it refuses to re-categorize them properly. It even remembers the podcast setting if I delete them from the library and then re-import them! How do I convince iTunes it’s wrong? AnswerThis turned out to be a brain teaser. I toyed around with iTunes for a bit, wondering what combination of taggings and untaggings could force iTunes to treat the track as it would any other MP3. Turns out, there’s an ID3 tag in these tracks that identifies them as podcasts and nothing I’ve found recognizes this fact – much less allows you to change it. All is not lost, but the solution is a bit of a pain, as it involves opening a binary file in vi or pico. Once you open the MP3 in the text editor of your choice, look in the first line of text for “PCS” and the control characters immediately thereafter. In my test file, I found the following in the middle of a very, very long line of gibberish.
...engiTunPGAP^@0^@^@PCS^@^@^D^@^@^@^@TID^@^@... I removed the text that reads “PCS^@^@^D^@^@^@^@” and saved, then imported the file into iTunes. It no longer recognized the file as a podcast. I would assume that an awk/sed regex script could automate this, but I don’t have enough podcasts to verify whether this tip is definitive, or whether there are variations on the PCS tag or its interior data (which appears to be a ^D). codepoet: Close, young padwan. Very close. The easy way is to mention the brilliantly clever Hex Fiend and to look for the letters “PCST” near the start of the file and replace them with something else, like spaces. Then mess with the title of the track while in there so you can tell them apart and then save and load. Really, the lesson is to just mention the brilliantly clever Hex Fiend as your solution is similar, but this one more exact. But you’re learning. ! http://www.macgeekery.com/mg/hex-fiend-podcast-fix.png! Now if you want to be useful rather than geeky, there’s a program that strips that tag out for you. All it needs is a compile. No, I won’t help; you go to Stanford and you can figure it out, kid. Have fun. For MP4 files, the atom to look for is ‘pcast’ instead. I just made the ‘p’ a space, changed the title (search for keywords in it and edit), and then saved and it worked like a charm.
About JC
 Author Biography JC is a former Mac Genius and Mac-centric IT worker with a background in print advertising. He earned a reputation as a miracle worker when he saved the day at a new business pitch with the arcane knowledge that Apple’s ADB cables were nothing more than poorly shielded S-Video cables. JC runs the Heroic Efforts Data Recovery Service and writes Ungenius, a tawdry tale of the life and times of a former Mac Genius. You can contact JC via IM or via the contact form. |
Just convert the ID3 tag to v1.0, then copy its art (if any) and the MP3 itself to your desktop. Then you delete the podcast file and import the MP3 into your iTune library. You can then convert the ID3 back to v2 and apply the album art once again, and it will stay in the main library.
Another way is to right-click (or control-click) the podcast file and choose “convert selection to MP3,” but that one isn’t as foolproof. When I’ve done it this way, the file has shown back up in the Podcast list sometimes at apparently random times.