Do you also find it difficult to maintain the podcasts you still need to listen to on your iPhone or iPod? Without casts that you’ve already heard taking up too much space on your device? The ideal would be that all new podcasts automatically end up on your device, and automatically disappear once you’ve listened to them to make space for new ones.

The trivial way to accomplish this is to enable the option “Automatically include All Unplayed episodes from All podcasts” in the synchronization options of your device in iTunes. However, this will give you all new podcasts without a convenient way to listen to all of them. During your commute, you will need to select a new episode to play from the iPod every time. Would it not be possible to make a standard playlist for this, so that all unplayed episodes will be played in order?

Using a smart playlist in iTunes this is possible.

To set this up do the following: Start iTunes, and in the File menu, select the option New Smart Playlist

Call the new playlist “New Podcasts” and add two selection criteria like in the following image:

Now connect your iPhone or iPod, go to the synchronization part and select the Podcast tab. Make sure to unselect the “Automatically include All” options, and instead, at the bottom, select the “New Podcasts” playlist in the Include Episodes from Playlists pane.

The result is a new playlist on your iPhone or iPod that you can use to listen to all podcasts you have not heard before.

You can change the order in which the podcasts are presented by selecting the New Podcasts playlist in iTunes, and sorting it there before syncing. I prefer to sort them ascending by publication date/time.