Playlist with music and podcasts in Catalina

For what it’s worth: a bit painful and rather ugly, but still possible. Here’s what I did to set up a semi-randomized playlist with a mix of music and podcasts on my MacBook, which I was able to then sync to my iPhone (and listen at will).

1. In the Podcasts application (on the mac), make sure the subscribed podcasts are set up to download. One way to do that is to click on the “Shows” icon, and then find a little circle icon with three dots. If you click on an individual show, it appears on the right side of the screen. It also might show on lower right of each icon as you hover over it. Click the three-dot icon, and select “Settings”

I chose custom settings.

Episode Order: Oldest to Newest

Download Episodes: Only New

Refresh Every: Week

One strange thing: after the os upgrade, several podcasts showed up twice, both marked as “subscribed”. I unsubscribed the duplicates before downloading.

Presumably there is a way to manually download only the episodes you actually want, but I did not see an obvious way to do that.

2. In the Music application (on the mac), create a Playlist called “staging”. There are several ways to do this, similar to the methods available in iTunes. When a playlist is displayed, it may be helpful to select “As Songs” from the View menu. Assume there’s already a playlist called “existing” that holds the music (or other audio) files you’re planning on mixing in with the podcasts.

3. Drag the podcast files into the “staging” playlist. You might be tempted to drag directly from the Podcast application’s “Download” window over to the Music application’s playlist. But that did not work. Although the files seemed be added to the playlist, they would not actually play, and after trying a few ways to induce playback on the new item, the Music application eventually froze and I had to “force quit”.

Instead, navigate to the downloaded Podcast files in the Finder, which is under the user’s home directory, beneath the “Library/Group Containers”. Since this directory is usually hidden, the easiest way to get there is probably to invoke “Go To Folder” from the Finder’s “Go” menu, and paste in the following:

~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache

Although the downloaded files have non-intuitive names (looks like hexadecimal uuid’s), the modify date and mp3 extension might give you an idea of what those files are. If you double-click one of the mp3’s, it will probably be displayed in QuickTime, which might show a little more information.

Drag these files from the Finder window straight into the Music “staging” Playlist. Some of the files may retain their unhelpful hexadecimal name, but others are updated automatically with the appropriate episode name. (That probably depends on how the audio file was encoded by the creators.)

4. In the Music application, select the songs you want from the “existing” playlist and add those into “staging” playlist. So now you have a playlist in Music with a bunch of podcasts and other audio. Presumably, you can manually arrange the order how you like now, and can stop here.

5. Randomize the playlist (if you like). Clear the “Up Next” list, by clicking the 3-horizontal-bar icon in upper right, scrolling to bottom and clicking “Clear”. Click the “Shuffle” button (and then pause to stop it playing).

6. Create a playlist called “final”. Copy the first song that started playing to the “final” playlist (since it is not included on “Up Next”). Then copy the songs in the “Up Next” list to the “final” playlist. “Up Next” shows only the next 20 songs. If you have more than 20 songs, hit the fast-forward icon 20 times, and copy the next chunk of “Up Next” to the “final” playlist. (And so on. In iTunes, you could option-click shuffle to see more than 20 in the “up next”, but that doesn’t seem to work in Music.)

Once everything is in “final”, you can manually re-arrange as desired.

7. Sync the “final” playlist with your device.

This isn't helpful, or maybe I'm obtuse, but I don't see anything in the link https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207542 that indicates how to mix podcasts with other audio in a single playlist within the Music application. It does mention using iTunes on the Mac, but that is not available in Catalina. I tried dragging selections from the Podcast application into the Music application, but those would not play back.

The best I could do was to download the podcasts to my laptop using the Podcasts app, and then copying them from the hidden podcast file cache (with the Finder) into the Music app. After they've been imported into the Music app, I re-enter some of the song/title info that got lost in the process, and place them manually in the playlists I like. The reply from October 20 has details on this process. (Other suggestions generally involve tilting at the Apple windmill in hopes that they will restore this functionality.)