I listen to lots of Podcasts on my iPod Touch and I prefer to listen to them in the order that they are released. Podcasts are much like radio or TV shows in that the information presented is often timely, or at least referential to prior episodes, and so it generally makes more sense to listen to shows in the order they are released so that related and timely information is heard around about the same time.

The included “Podcasts” view in iTunes and on my iPod Touch groups different episodes of the same show together with no option to see all episodes of all shows in one big list. This makes it easy to listen to all the episodes of one show in the order they were released, but virtually impossible to listen to all episodes of all shows in the order they were released.

I got around that by creating a Smart Playlist that searches my iTunes Library for Podcasts. My preferred sort order for that playlist, naturally, is by date. That sort order gets transferred over to the iPod initially, and as new shows are added (as they automatically get downloaded by iTunes) they get added to the end of the list in the order they are downloaded. This works extremely well for me most of the time.

Unfortunately every once in awhile the sort order on my iPod gets out of whack (seemingly at random, and in a totally random order), and there is no way on the iPod to reorganize playlists. /They can be reorganized in many different ways in iTunes (by artist, by date, alphabetically, etc.), but I couldn’t figure out how to sync those changes back to my iPod. No matter what I changed in iTunes, the sort order on my iPod stayed scrambled.

Finally I noticed a cryptic command on the right-click menu for the playlist called “Copy to Play Order“. I still have no idea what the name of this command is supposed to mean, because it doesn’t do anything to the playlist in iTunes, but after choosing this option and syncing the iPod to iTunes, the sort order for my playlist magically matches with that in iTunes. Yay!

I don’t understand why I would have to take this extra step as it seems obvious to me that if I can’t sort my playlists directly on the iPod, but I can in iTunes, then I probably want the sort order on my iPod to match what I choose in iTunes. Is that so much of a stretch??

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