Apple Podcasts may silently consume tens of GB of storage - check your StreamedMedia folder

Have you ever noticed that your Mac storage keeps filling up, but macOS does not clearly show what is using the space?

I investigated this on my Mac and found what appears to be a reproducible storage leak in Apple Podcasts.

In my case, Podcasts had accumulated about 20 GB in this folder:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia

Earlier, I had seen the same folder grow to roughly 58–72 GB.

The strange part: I was not using Podcasts on the Mac.

I deleted the contents of StreamedMedia, reducing it to: 0 B

Then I disabled in Podcasts settings:

• Sync Library
• Download When Saving
• Automatic Downloads

I also removed the Podcasts app from my iPhone, so there was no active iPhone use to synchronize.

Despite that, after three days the folder had grown again to:

897 MB

5 files

I checked the files and found something unusual: every .mp3 had a logical size of 0 bytes, but macOS had allocated exactly 367,424 disk blocks for each one - about 179.4 MiB per file.

Example:

logical=0 bytes | blocks=367424

I then monitored filesystem activity with fs_usage.

At 23:50, without manually opening Podcasts, the Podcasts process itself created another file inside:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia/

Immediately afterward:

before: 5 files / 897 MB

after:  6 files / 1.1 GB

The new file again had:

logical=0 bytes

blocks=367424

So the pattern appears to be:

Podcasts periodically creates ~179 MB preallocated temporary MP3 files in the background, but they are not properly cleaned up.

Over time, these files can accumulate into tens of gigabytes.

Check your Mac

To see how much space Podcasts is using:

** -sh ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia

Count the files:

find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia -type f | wc -l

Check the total size of the entire Podcasts container:

** -sh ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts

To inspect whether you have the same 0-byte / preallocated-file pattern:

find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia -type f \

-exec stat -f "%Sm | logical=%z bytes | blocks=%b | %N" \

-t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" {} \;

Cleaning the cache

Quit Podcasts first.

Then you can delete only the contents of the temporary StreamedMedia folder:

find ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia -mindepth 1 -delete

Verify afterward:

** -sh ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/tmp/StreamedMedia

It should show approximately: 0B

This does not delete the Podcasts application itself; it clears the temporary files in this cache directory.

Can you reproduce this?

If you use Apple Podcasts, please check the command above and post:

• the size of your StreamedMedia folder;
• the number of files;
• whether the files show logical=0 bytes with a large non-zero blocks value;
• your macOS version.

I would be especially interested to know whether this is a widespread Podcasts bug or triggered only by certain accounts/configurations.

If your Mac has mysteriously lost tens of gigabytes of storage, this folder is worth checking.