How does iTunes and iPod treat podcast files compared to song or audiobook files?
Podcasts won’t show up in Party Shuffle unless you drag them into the Party Shuffle playlist, and Autofill won’t include podcasts when copying files to an iPod. In iTunes 4.9, there were some limitations to how podcasts could be used. For example, you could not access podcasts using Music Sharing or create a Smart Playlist of podcasts.
