trevelyan on January 18, 2013 | reply

Hi Chibo - the levels are tagged in one of the id3 fields, so you should be able to sort through them using iTunes or pretty much any other mp3/podcast player.

chibo912 on January 18, 2013 | reply

Thanks! I'm a bit of an iTunes novice...

cleo on January 31, 2013 | reply

I have this same question. Can you explain how to do this more clearly?

I am getting all the podcasts as one lump and it's hard to navigate through them.

na.1788 on January 31, 2013 | reply

in iTunes, I make a Smart Playlist

File --> New Smart Playlist

I sort through different levels using these criteria

Album: PopUp Chinese

Artist: Absolute Beginners (or Elementary, or Intermediate, etc.)

I name the Smart Playlist with the name of the level (Elementary, Intermediate)

When I want just the dialogue or the fix, I add

Name - contains - dialogue (or fix)

When I want to exclude the dialogue and the fix

Name - doesn't contain - dialogue (or fix)

In the podcast stream, all the episodes are lumped together

the levels (elementary, etc.) don't show up until I play an episode or add them to the playlist

jaynewman.china on February 20, 2013 | reply

Thanks, na.1788! I deleted all the lessons thinking I needed to start over, download just the elementary level, tag it in some way; then create another playlist or group or something to do only the intermediate. Of course when I did that, popupchinese for some reason downloaded them all again even though I had changed my subscriptions to elementary only. No idea why it did that, but itunes is now merrily downloading all and sorting as it goes... A mere 1039 items. No idea how I'll decide which ones to concentrate on.

mameige on February 7, 2013 | reply

Thanks for this information. Is it right that I have to download podcasts in full in advance to listen to them? I have not been using Popupchinese because I can't get it to work in iTunes or other downloading programs. Is it right that the latest elementary podcast was in December 2012? (I have a premium subscription).

Thanks very much for the user's information on how to get only the lessons. Some kind person at popupchinese sent me a huge file in November but a) I couldn't get it to work in my car, though it should understand MP3s and b) it seemed to consist only of dialogues with no explanation and c) it was a huge file I couldn't navigate around. I now accept that I have to be sitting at my computer to use popupchinese, but presumably I have to go for all the older lessons (no problem). I find the elementary podcasts really good, especially the language explanations, when I can locate one!