How to manually add a podcast file to iTunes and merge w/ pre-existing podcast feed?

[drukepple]

Hi all, I searched around for an answer here, but had no luck...

So, here's the deal. I subscribe to a certain podcast that only puts one episode at a time in its feed, and I recently missed an episode because of being on vacation (iTunes was never opened during the window of time that that particular episode was "live"). Well, I managed to secure a copy of the mp3 file from a friend who also listens to the same podcast and managed to get that one.

That's all well and good, except that when I added the file to iTunes, it showed up in my Podcast list as it's own podcast, right underneath the "official" entry that is the actual feed subscription. So now I have two entries for the same podcast, one that is the regular entry, but missing that one episode, and one that has only that one episode, and also has a big obnoxious "Subscribe" button on it.

This happens to be a podcast that I keep all episodes of, so I want to keep these in my library. But me being the organizational nitpicker that I am, I'd like to just plop this one episode into the regular entry of the podcast, the one that will continue to download episodes, and just have a regular, complete set of podcasts, instead of two incomplete sets.

I tried poking around in my iTunes Library.xml file, but I couldn't find anything that links a given file to a podcast entry.

Is this possible? How do I go about this?

Thanks...

Dru

[isobel78]

I'm having this same problem, did you ever find a solution?

[drukepple]

No.

On another forum (I forget where) I saw that someone mentioned that David Pogue talked about this at one point, and said it was essentially impossible. If Pogue doesn't know, then I'm just going to stop putting effort into it.

Sorry...

[Quartz Extreme]

I've found the solution (http://markbowers.org/cms/?q=node/185).

It involves temporarily setting up a webserver on your machine to serve up a modified XML file that you fool iTunes into loading by changing your hosts file.

It's annoying that you can't do it from within iTunes, but in the meantime this'll get the job done.

[drukepple]

Thanks, Quartz Extreme! It makes sense...I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like a crafty way to accomplish the task. Thanks for finding that and posting it here.