Cannot download podcasts in iTunes 11

If you click on the !-in-a-circle you will get a message telling you what the problem is (though it may be a bit unspecific). When you say you can stream an episode do you mean you can play it in the iTunes Store page but cannot get it when subscribing (since there is no streaming when subscribing).

Double-clicking does download the episode, playing it as it does so (you should see the progress in a little circle to the left of the title): I don't know why the download button doesn't work - it certainly should do so. You can get round this by double clicking the episode and then hitting the space bar to pause it - it will go on downloading and be available to play when required.

I'll correct what I said before - I was misled when I checked into this. Double-clicking does stream and not place the file in the library (I don't know what happens when you've played it all but probably it just disappears). On the other hand I had no difficulty downloading an episode, and when first subscribing the top episode downloaded automatically. You say this happens with all your podcasts, in which case it can't be a peculiarity with the actual podcast; and your Permissions have nothing to do with it, they apply to files actually on your hard disk.

My guess would be that something has become corrupted, most likely the Preferences. Try quitting iTunes and going to (user)/Library/Preferences and removing to a folder somewhere else all files beginning with com.apple.itunes (there may be quite a lot of them). Then try it all again. You could test it by going to my iTunes Store page:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-sound-of-78s/id166389425?mt=2

and subscribing from that, as I know that works. If it now works for you, then just trash the prefs files - obviously you will have to reset any settings.

(Apple have hidden the user’s Library folder in Lion and Mountain Lion to casual viewers, in an attempt to stop new Mac users messing their machines up. To access it, in the Finder go to the ‘Go’ menu and hold down the Option (Alt) key; the Library folder will appear as a choice.)

I'm afraid I'm out of ideas - it's not a situation I've come across before, and I can see no logical explanation for it.

I'm having the same problem. It just started happening this week for some reason. I've tried deleting all apple folders under my user folders and everything. It's so weird. I can't download podcasts and I can't download my audible books either. Itunes is officially totally broken right now.

The issue is the permissions of the iTunes library file. Run Disk Utility and repair permissions on your system drive. If that doesn't work, you need to start up from the Recovery Partition. Hold down the alt/option key during start up and select the Recovery Drive from the choices that will appear. Then run its Disk Utility and repair permissions on your system drive. This corrected the problem on both of my systems.

It was a permissions issue. I'm on Windows 8. I had to change the permissions on the folder where my music was stored. Specifically I believe it was the ".iTunes Preferences.plist" file that was causing the problems. Not sure how the permissions got messed up on that folder, but once I gave myself full permissions on that folder and all sub folders I was able to download pocasts and audible books again.