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Turning A Podcast Track Into A Music Track in iTunes

I subscribe to a few song of the day podcasts, which makes it easy to get the tracks, but difficult to enjoy them as music in iTunes. But podcast tracks can’t be simply moved over to the music section of your library, it takes a little finagling.

There’s a lot of advice out there suggesting you use one of the menu commands to convert the track to MP3 or AAC, but I prefer not to re-encode my music, and that’s a big hammer for a small problem. To wit: all you really need to do is remove a special ID3 tag that iTunes adds to podcast files to identify them as such. You could use an app like Jaikoz Audio Tagger to strip that tag one-by-one, but you can do it faster all within iTunes.

<a title=“Select the files, the right-click and select “convert id3 tags…” by misterbisson, on Flickr” href=“http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisonbisson/3294271036/"><img src=“http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3653/3294271036_da96a54ab5_m.jpg” alt=“Select the files, the right-click and select “convert id3 tags…”” width=“240” height=“130” /> convert the id3 tags to 1.0 or 1.1

  1. Select the podcast tracks you’d like to move to your music library
  2. Right-click (or Control-click) on them and select the Convert ID3 Tags… option from the contextual menu
  3. Convert the tag version to v1.0 or v.1.1
  4. Copy the tracks to a folder on your desktop or some other temporary location
  5. Delete the podcast tracks from iTunes
  6. Add the tracks you’d temporarily copied to your desktop back to iTunes (you can probably delete the tracks from your desktop when done with this step)
  7. Enjoy those tracks as regular music