Have you ever listened to a podcast and wanted to add it to your permanent music collection?  As a subscriber to Triple J’s New Music podcast I have, and found out the hard way its not as straight forward a task as you might expect.

At first I tried deleting the mp3s from my iTunes library, then reimporting them.  That’s how I discovered iTunes modifies all podcasts to permanently reflect how they made it into iTunes in the first place.  To move podcasts into the music library you need to strip these metadata tags from the files before reimporting them.

There are a few techniques for this floating around on the web but many are drastic or ineffective.  A number of pages advocate removing all of the ID3v2 tags or converting the podcast’s format but I was hoping for something a little less destructive. fixid3tag looked promising but it was built during the iTunes v4 timeframe and didn’t detect that my iTunes v7 podcasts were in fact podcasts.  Eventually I returned to my favourite mp3 tag editor and found it had a simple solution:

1. If you don’t already have it, download and install mp3tag.  Make sure you enable the shell integration feature (if given the choice).
2. If the podcasts you want to move are still in your iTunes podcast list, delete them from iTunes but make sure you select the "keep files" option when asked.
3. In Windows Explorer, select all of the podcasts you want to move into your Music Library.  Right click on them and select the mp3tag option.
4. When mp3Tag opens select all of the files listed in the right hand pane, and right click on them.  In the context menu that appears pick the Extended Tags option.
5. In the dialog box you will see an "ITUNESPODCAST = 1" entry.  Select it and hit the remove button (the red X), then OK.
6. Save the changes to the files then exit mp3tag.
7. The podcasts will now be recognised as ordinary MP3s by iTunes.  Import the files into your Music Library as you would any other music file.

Before you exit mp3Tag (i.e. before step 6) you might also want to clean up the titles, artist, album and track information so the automatic renaming feature of iTunes will work as expected.  In my case I changed the album name to that of the podcast and set the album to a compilation after importing into iTunes.

Until Apple resolves this gap in iTunes’ functionality, this is the simplest way I know of to integrate podcasts into your Music Library.  Hopefully you will find this tip as effective as I have.