everyday mac tools

Podcasts, Music and TV downloads are taking up space on a Mac

· 6 min read

Media apps download in the background, and Podcasts is the usual surprise: with automatic downloads on, every show you follow keeps adding episodes whether you listen to them or not. To see how much is involved, open System Settings, General, Storage and read the Podcasts, Music and TV rows. Then remove the downloads from inside each app, not from Finder, and change one setting per app so the space stays free.

Removing a download is not the same as deleting the item. In all three apps the episode, song or movie stays in your library and can be streamed or downloaded again. The one exception is music you imported yourself, which is covered below.

See how much each app is holding

  1. Open System Settings, then General, then Storage.
  2. Wait for the colored bar to finish calculating. On a nearly full disk this can take a minute or two.
  3. Look for the Podcasts, Music and TV rows. A row appears only when that app has something stored on the Mac.
  4. Click the info button (the circled i) at the right of a row to see what is downloaded and how large each item is.

That panel can delete items too, but the apps give you more context, such as whether a copy exists in the cloud. Use the Storage panel to measure and the app to remove.

Podcasts: remove episodes and stop automatic downloads

To clear what is already there:

  1. Open the Podcasts app.
  2. In the sidebar, under Library, click Downloaded. Every show with episodes on the Mac is listed.
  3. Control-click an episode and choose Remove Download. To clear a whole show at once, Control-click the show instead.

The episode stays in your library with a download arrow beside it, so you can still play it over the network.

To stop the pile from growing back:

  1. Choose Podcasts, then Settings, and open the General tab.
  2. Set Automatically Download to Off, or to a lower limit than the current one.
  3. Tick Remove Played Downloads. Podcasts then clears an episode by itself about a day after you finish it.

Those are the defaults for every show. A daily news show and a monthly interview show deserve different rules, so open a show’s page, click the More button (three dots), and choose Settings to override the download behavior for that show alone.

One caution about Finder. The episode files live deep in your Library, in ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache. You can open that folder with Go to Folder (Shift-Command-G) and press Command-I to measure it, but do not delete files there by hand. The app’s database would still list them as downloaded, and you end up with episodes that refuse to play.

Music: downloads you can remove, and files you cannot get back

Music holds two kinds of file, and they need different handling.

  • Downloads with a copy in the cloud. Songs from a subscription, store purchases, and anything matched or uploaded by Sync Library. These can be removed and fetched again at any time.
  • Files that exist only on this Mac. Albums you imported from discs or bought elsewhere, when Sync Library is off. Delete one of these and it is gone unless you have a backup.

To remove the first kind:

  1. In Music, choose View, then Only Downloaded Music, so you are looking only at what is on the disk.
  2. Control-click a song, album or playlist and choose Remove Download.

If the menu offers only Delete from Library, Music has no cloud copy to fall back on. Stop there and check your backup before you go further.

Three settings decide how fast the space fills again:

  • Music, Settings, General, Automatic Downloads. When ticked, everything you add to your library is downloaded straight away. Untick it and choose what to keep offline yourself.
  • Music, Settings, Playback. Look at the download quality. Lossless downloads are considerably larger than the standard setting, and few listeners need them on a laptop’s internal drive.
  • Music, Settings, Files. This shows the Music Media folder location, normally ~/Music/Music/Media. A big library can live on an external drive: change the location here, then choose File, Library, Organize Library and tick Consolidate Files.

TV: downloaded movies and shows

Video is the heaviest of the three per item. A handful of movies can outweigh an entire podcast backlog.

  1. Open the TV app and go to Library, then Downloaded.
  2. Control-click a movie or episode and choose Remove Download.

Purchases stay in your library and can be downloaded again later.

Then open TV, Settings, Files and tick Automatically delete watched movies and TV shows. It is the same switch as the Optimize Storage recommendation at the top of System Settings, General, Storage. In the Playback tab you can also lower the download quality, which makes future downloads smaller.

Leftovers from older libraries

A Mac that has been migrated from older Macs often carries a ~/Music/iTunes folder from before the Music app existed. The part worth a look is iTunes Media/Mobile Applications: iPhone app files from the years when apps synced through the computer. Nothing on a current Mac uses them, and they can add up to several gigabytes.

Before you remove anything in that folder, check Music, Settings, Files. If the media folder location still points inside ~/Music/iTunes, your actual music lives there too. In that case leave the music folders alone and remove only Mobile Applications.

Repeated imports are the other classic leftover: the same album sitting in the library two or three times. Find duplicate files on a Mac without deleting the wrong copy covers how to pick the right one to keep.

When media is not the real problem

If the three rows add up to a few gigabytes and the disk is still full, the space is somewhere else. The usual suspects are the Photos library, message attachments and the System Data category; What System Data is on a Mac, and how to shrink it is the place to start.

For a view of the whole disk in one pass, Crumb is a menu bar disk cleaner whose audit covers the entire Mac and not just your home folder: System Data split into caches, logs, swap, temporary files and leftovers, Time Machine local snapshots, old iPhone backups, and which user account on a shared Mac holds the most. The audit is read-only and free. Its Duplicates tool, part of the $9 one-time unlock, is useful for the repeated-import problem above. Media downloads themselves are still best removed inside Podcasts, Music and TV, because those apps keep their own records of what is on disk.

Questions

Will removing a download delete the episode or song from my library? No. Remove Download deletes only the file on the Mac. The item stays in your library and can be streamed or downloaded again. Delete from Library is the command that removes it altogether.

Why do podcast episodes keep coming back after I remove them? Automatic downloads are still on, either in Podcasts, Settings, General or in the settings of one particular show. Check both. A show-level setting overrides the general one.

I removed several gigabytes and the free space did not change. Why? The Storage panel can lag, so close System Settings and open it again. If the number still has not moved, a local snapshot may be holding the space for a while; You emptied the Trash but your Mac got no space back explains what is happening.