ios 13.2 deleting podcasts randomly

I agree, it is easy, and everything you say is true. But there still might be some minor edits you have to make after changing media type, especially if listening to things in order matters. I had to edit some of the metadata after I changed them from podcast to audiobook because for some reason, itunes put things out of order for a handful of files, even though all of the files were uniformly named, numbered, and properly ordered by date while in podcast form.

In most cases, to get them in the right order, I had to open the metadata for the files out of order, delete the last letter of the title, retype it, and then hit ok. That put it in the right order. Otherwise the file would not go in the right order. Such a weird glitch but that's Apple these days I guess. That's another reason why I won't use Catalina - because you can't edit the metadata for individual files in audiobooks in Catalina anymore.

Bottom line, it is very easy to change from podcast to audiobook and you can do every single file at once. But there might be some minor cleanup needed after the fact. It's definitely worth it though.

I am still having the same problem as well. My belief is that the glitch occurs when I open another app on the phone. The last 4 times it has happened to me while I was actually listening, it happened at the exact moment I opened another app. It was a different app each time. It never deletes all of the episodes, just a huge majority of them. They immediately re-sync when I connect to my MacBook. I have not yet heard back from Apple Support even though it has been 9 days since I talked to them.

It’s somewhat encouraging that you actually received a response and it seems sort of consistent with the disaster that is podcasts in Catalina (since you can’t add any of your own episodes into podcasts anymore). But I still don’t think they know what they are talking about. I base that on two things: 1) the deletion to my podcasts happens to podcasts that are unplayed and still in the feeds, as well as unplayed podcasts I added myself not part of any feed and 2) what is deleted changes every time and it’s almost never all of it. It’s just randomly deleting certain episodes of certain podcasts, not even all of one podcast. I think they screwed up and have no idea how to fix it, and don’t care.

I should add my own personal speculation is that there is a bug in the code and certain apps interact with the iOS causing a glitch that deletes things. I am no engineer and have no idea how to program anything, but I frequently see deletions occur upon opening and switching between apps. Sadly it’s not always the same apps such that I can delete the app and not have it happen. But for me it has happened upon opening native Weather, Words with Friends, Clash of Clans, And Safari - and those are the ones I know because the episode I’m listening to has disappeared along with others upon opening those specific apps.

Excellent summary, smamm.

As someone who has converted thousands of podcast files over to audiobook format, I'll just add that despite the similar concerns I had about making all those conversions, since my metadata was in good condition, they converted quickly and without any problems at all. But I am meticulous (some might say an@l) about the accuracy and detail of my metadata, so I had spent a lot of time beforehand getting everything to where the conversion was literally just changing the media type from podcast to audiobook.

Hope Apple finally fixes this someday, but I am not sure they care (about this or a lot of other details anymore).