After listening to many podcasts over the years, they have suddenly stopped working. I can't download episodes anymore; I get that exclamation-point icon in the left-most column.

Clicking on it brings up an error message saying I don't have enough "access privileges for this operation." I've never heard of that before in relation to podcasts, and indeed, the Help files make no mention of it.

I suspect this may be due to my recent upgrade of my Mac: although I'm using the same admin account from the migration, I had to rename its "shortname" (that appears as the title of the Home folder). Could this have something to do with this problem?

In any case, anybody know how to get back the "access privileges" for podcasts?

Thanks for you help!

In general it's not a good idea to change a shortname. Perhaps the files/folders are owned by the old shortname -- that would cause the problem you are seeing.

Start a terminal window and execute the command


It should show something like:


where (from my example), "server" is the system name and "admin" is the short name. What is important is that on the prompt line the short name is correct and on every line in the listing you see the short name after the number. If the latter isn't true, then there is another owner for the files. You can fix this up by issuing the commands:


where, again, "admin" is the short name. Note that it never hurts to issue this command since all files and folders in the user's home folder should be owned by the user.

Thanks for your help.

All folders listed in Terminal had the correct shortname, except the last one, which was root. I went ahead and did the sudo command anyway, but still can't download any podcasts.

However, I just realized I didn't reboot or re-login afterward. Perhaps I should have?

Rebooting won't matter. Perhaps the problem is you don't have the rights to write to the podcasts folder.

Go to terminal and enter the command:

Do the ls -l command and see if the entry for iTunes Media starts drwxr-xr-x

If there is no iTunes Media listed, then execute:

and start iTunes and try again.

If iTunes Media is present but appears other than drwxr-xr-x, execute:

(note there is a single space after the backslash)
and start iTunes and try again.

If it still doesn't work, start the terminal again and issue the command:

and do the ls -l command and see if the entry for Podcasts starts drwxr-xr-x

If it is other than drwxr-xr-x issue the command

otherwise issue the command


If it still doesn't work, I'd just rename the iTunes folder and have iTunes create it anew. Then you could import any existing music files. But you would lose any playlists and other information (ratings) you have.

wow, Talmy, thanks for the time and trouble you have put into this.

I have now resolved the problem: it was the Shared folder permissions. I don't quite understand it, but podcasts involve the Shared folder -- within the Users folder -- and it was these permissions I had to correct.

All is now well, and even tho' I didn't use your latest terminal commands, I REALLY appreciate the time you've take to help me.

You went "above and beyond," as they say. You're tops in my book.

I'm glad you got it going. I download hours of podcasts per week and don't seem to have anything related to iTunes in /Users/Shared. Weird. But as I initially said, it's not a good idea to change your shortname.

When I was migrating, the software assistant forced me to change the shortname because I had another account with the same one on the new computer. I knew it would lead to problems.

If you're interested, someone referred me to this article about podcasts and the Shared folder: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1277

Thanks for the link. Really strange since Shared has to be there but doesn't actually seem to get used!