I have a 2012 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro with OS X 10.11.5 and have just updated iTunes to the current version, 11.4.1.6.
Just within the past hour I was playing World of Warcraft which players will know can take up a lot of bandwidth and can be badly affected by other programs downloading stuff. I started having lag problems and in checking around I found that iTunes was beginning its set of daily downloads of podcasts (I have a few dozen which I must admit I have NOT been keeping up). OK, that was fine: I told iTunes to pause its downloads until I got to a convenient stopping point in WoW, then restarted those iTunes downloads.
I looked around and found under the Settings button on my podcasts screen that I could set iTunes to "refresh" for new podcasts for various periods (which I already had set to "Daily"). The one setting that IS missing was to schedule a specific time.
My web searches found advice that after I told iTunes to refresh my podcasts lists "Daily" that the only way I can set that refresh time was to stay up to, say, 4 am and tell iTunes to refresh then. Of course if I were to ever to start a refresh subsequent to that then THAT particular time of the day would be the new daily time for refresh.
Why isn't there a setting that will set a specific time for refreshing? Personally I would prefer to set this to 4 am, but I imagine that would be plenty of people who would schedule it for, say, 1 pm so this would happen in the middle of their workday.
If there might be a problem due to several hundreds of thousands of computers beginning their refreshes at precisely 4 am, then there could be an added randomizing factor of between 0 and 1000 seconds to that start time. Surely splitting the start times by 1000 would be enough to split the load of machines? Or it could be from 0 to 3599 seconds to spread the starting times to over the entire hour.
