How do I delete podcasts from my playlist in iTunes 12?

I had the same question, but I figured it out. Along the bottom of the window, there's a drop box labeled "Show:" Click on this and select "Unplayed/My episodes and saved."

This way, anything you've deleted or haven't downloaded will go away. I don't think it's a perfect solution, but I'm sufficiently mollified for the time being.

I really hate the creep of cloud information into every facet of our digital lives, though. Why would I need a list of every episode of every podcast I listen to?

Thank you!!!!!! Control+Shift+Delete finally got rid of podcasts in the list of ones I subscribe to. Several have just stopped abruptly or were limited run. iTunes can't be bothered to be helpful or simple anymore.

For me, the following worked:

1. from the View menu, pick Media Kind > Podcasts (Ctrl - 4)

2. right-click on the podcast

3. pick Delete from the context menu

When in the device view in iTunes, I found absolutely no way to delete podcasts.

To the left top, under the play button you have different icons: music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, three dots and your iphone if it's connected.

Select podcast, then you will see the list of recent, unplayed, saved, etc. Right click any and it will pop a menu with the delete option.

It took me a while to get here because I was in the iPhone podcast list and you can't delete from there.

Yes, that's how it's supposed to work. But it doesn't. Or it does only sometimes. Here's what indeed is supposed to be available when right-clicking:

Obviously I can click "delete" and it will ask me if I really want to and whether to send to trash, etc etc.

However, here's how it works with the next item down:

Sorry, I know that these are Mac screenshots, but this is the only place I found the problem described. If nothing else, let them serve as evidence that we aren't just imagining the problem.

This may be a part of the answer:

On my system (Mac but it looks very similar to the complaints here) the podcasts in question had somehow gotten saved as Music albums/songs with the genre "podcast" instead of the the media type "podcast". They appeared in the Podcast list as well as the Music list.

The solution was to go into Music, find the podcasts in my album list, and delete them there. Afterward, they no longer appeared in my Podcast list.

This also happened with items from iTunes U. Same fix.

Fix crossposted How do I delete a podcast from iTunes 12?

I too had way too many saved podcasts. On the MBP in iTunes I can highlight the podcasts I want to delete (shift click to highlight many) then hold down the command key while clicking the delete key on my keyboard. All gone! I would love to find a way to get them to stop updating themselves in iTunes every time I open it. I only listen to podcasts on my phone and would love to just use the "feed" option, but haven't figured that out yet.

This post finally helped me; on Windows, though, I had to use Control-Delete instead of Command-Delete. Thanks for this response!!!

I am still at a loss. I highlight all the podcasts under saved, click delete, they're still there. I tried the control/delete, same thing. Very frustrating.

Here's my fix. In the upper right corner, click on "Unplayed" rather than "Feed." "Feed," apparently, shows you all the episodes that are not currently downloaded on your Playlist. "Unplayed" shows you what you've not yet marked as Played. Then, if you're in the "Unplayed" (rather than "Feed") mode, you can SOMETIMES delete episodes by right clicking them and choosing "Delete." On my pc, I haven't found that Ctrl + Delete have any impact. I have no idea why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

Earlier on, a line of text appeared towards the top of my Podcast Playlist saying that it would delete episodes that I marked as "Played." I no longer see this text, but if you see it, give it permission to do this. Then, you can right click the episode and mark it as Played and iTunes will put it in a special category marked for deletion. Why it doesn't Delete right away and when it will, I also have no idea.

I have to agree playing podcasts on my iPod has become more complicated and un-intuitive with each new version of Apple software. I hope that Apple staff will read the weird issues that come up because of the apparent lack of concern with simplicity of user-interface. Please, Apple, come down to Earth and make it possible for non-techies to use your software.

I had the same issue on my mac and after much fiddling around (as you do), When I changed the drop down menu on the top right hand side ( under the search library field) to 'podcast' instead of 'episode' it then let me delete the podcasts that were left. ( I had marked them as unplayed already ) All the others were deleted when the dropdown menu showed Episode. ( sorry I've just tried to upload an image but its not liking it :-)

The playlist itself could only be deleted after going back to "My podcasts" and then back to 'playlists"

Really odd behaviour.

Hope it helps.

I finally figured out what caused the original issue with duplicate podcasts, though I have *no* idea how to fix it. I just sent the following feedback to Apple...

My local machines and iOS devices have been encountering a bug for quite some time where podcasts that I manually sync to my phone are duplicated, with extra folders representing the podcast and everything. I never could figure it out. Then it stopped doing it for a month or so, and I figured you had fixed it. But the bug came back last night, and I realized what the issue is. For some reason, even though I have the iPhone set to NOT download podcasts (I ONLY want to sync them from my PC), it's still syncing them. When I run the program iVolume to fix the playback volume levels of mp3s, it's modifying the metadata, and iTunes/iOS thinks I now have duplicate podcasts. Please fix this!

Ugh. My iTunes podcasts are getting so messy. When I play and delete them, they download again. They will not auto delete anymore. They just hang around like zombie podcasts refusing to die.

I wish I could reinstall iTunes from wayback, when podcast management was simple and when there was iTunes DJ.