I’ve been using iTunes for Windows with mixed results and would like to try the podcast subscription feature. How do I subscribe to a podcast – and unsubscribe if I don’t like it! – in iTunes for Windows?
Apple has spent years adding features and capabilities to iTunes and it’s become rather a complicated beast. Add to that Apple’s design team preferring to work on the Mac than on a Windows system in the first place and it’s no wonder that iTunes for Windows is rather a bit, well, confusing!
Still, one of its real strengths is working with podcasts, whether you listen to indie content from your favorite local personality or slickly produced broadcast content from National Public Radio, The BBC or your local Clear Channel affiliated radio program. Indeed, there’s a crazy number of podcasts available through the Apple Store and they’re all free. How can you not like that?
What’s better is that if you subscribe to a podcast in iTunes you have a lot of control over what it downloads, how many episodes of the program it saves, and much more. We’ll get to that, though. To start, launch iTunes on your Win10 system. On the top left where it says “Music”, click and choose “Podcasts”:
As you can see, there’s quite a range of different options from which to choose here. Once you choose Podcasts it’s like you’re in a different program and it works rather differently than how iTunes lets you play music.
First up, let’s pick some podcasts!
You can click on some of the podcasts shown here on the front page in the “New & Noteworthy” area, but instead click on “All Categories” on the right just below Podcasts to see all options:
Lots of variety, hard to imagine anyone wouldn’t be able to find a podcast or three to check out from these categories.
As for me, I enjoy learning, so I’m going to choose Education and see what comes up:
Hmmm… some very interesting options. A bit further down, however, an icon catches my eye so I click on it. Here’s the info page I get as a result:
Notice that there’s a description, I can read reviews, see related podcasts and that it shows the latest episodes and their popularity. Amazingly, looks like episode 263 of The British History Podcast was just shared, so that’s a lot of catching up!
To subscribe, I can simply click on the “Subscribe” button immediately below the podcast graphic.
Yes, iTunes, I do want to actually subscribe to the podcast that I clicked “Subscribe” on. Bah, computers. I indicate this by again clicking “Subscribe”, which causes iTunes to immediately download the latest episode, all ready to listen:
Where this gets interesting is once you’ve subscribed to a couple of podcasts, because then “Library” shows them all, and “Unplayed” shows every episode that you haven’t yet heard:
Not sure you have the very latest episodes of everything? Click “Refresh” on the bottom and it’ll check every subscribed podcast to see if there’s anything new. Perhaps more interestingly in terms of managing your podcast subscriptions, right-click on any of the podcasts on your list. A menu pops up with lots of choices:
I’ve highlighted one choice that many people seem to have a hard time finding: Unsubscribe Podcast. That’s how you change your mind and unsubscribe from a podcast that you have been not enjoying so much. Just above it is another really interesting option “Podcast Settings”. Choose that and you’ll see you really can fine tune exactly how iTunes for Windows works with each of the different podcast subscriptions:
I highly recommend fine tuning your settings for each of the podcasts, having a big backlog of your favorites but only having the most recent episode of those you listen to sporadically. And that’s it. Now you’re an expert on iTunes for Windows and how it works with podcasts!