getting a podcast on iTunes?

toasterman

Thanks for explaining that sra.

I'm slightly confused as to how the listings works on iTunes' podcasts.. some of them don't seem to work, yet appear in the top 100.
If I subscribe to say.. the nbc scrubs one.. then it won't download so I unsubscribe.. do I count towards the total number of subscribers, or does it remove me from the total when I unsubscribe?
Some of the podcasts on there haven't been updated in a year or more, yet still feature in the top 100. Odd.


Also, regarding getting it approved by iTunes.. it says on that page:
"Upon submission, your podcast is placed in a queue for review by the iTunes staff."
This may sound like a stupid question, but presumably if I'm putting all podcasts up under the same name, they only check the first one manually? You don't have to queue and wait for every episode of every podcast to be approved?
I like the idea of people searching.. not sure about people rating.. lol. Nobody wants to be a 1-star.

sra

toasterman wrote: »

Thanks for explaining that sra.

I'm slightly confused as to how the listings works on iTunes' podcasts.. some of them don't seem to work, yet appear in the top 100.
If I subscribe to say.. the nbc scrubs one.. then it won't download so I unsubscribe.. do I count towards the total number of subscribers, or does it remove me from the total when I unsubscribe?
Some of the podcasts on there haven't been updated in a year or more, yet still feature in the top 100. Odd.


Also, regarding getting it approved by iTunes.. it says on that page:
"Upon submission, your podcast is placed in a queue for review by the iTunes staff."
This may sound like a stupid question, but presumably if I'm putting all podcasts up under the same name, they only check the first one manually? You don't have to queue and wait for every episode of every podcast to be approved?
I like the idea of people searching.. not sure about people rating.. lol. Nobody wants to be a 1-star.

When Itunes first came out with its podcast directory there was a huge amount of speculation about how they came up with their figures and Itunes never told (Maybe they've changed this - you'd have to search and look through their documentation).
There was some speculation that if might be deliberately kept a secret like Google does for it's search algorithm so that people can't manipulate it by manipulating the rules they're using (Like they did at first - Itunes had to change the way it worked very quickly).

Some of the feeds might be empty because the contents gets taken down shortly after publishing - BBC won't let a big long feed with previous shows exist, they're only up for a week then removed.

Can't explain why some would have shows you can't download. Podcasts are often neglected especially by big companies. They want to sound all futuristic by having a podcast but then forget to make sure the links keep working.

As to submitting, I believe they only look at your feed once and approve it. They have been known to later remove shows from their catalogue - they caused a fuss by doing that to some adult podcasts last year - but the itpc link will always work because that's an instruction direct to your Itunes software rather than going through their directory.

If you think your podcast is good quality then I'd wait to submit it till you had some good shows at the top of your feed in the hope that they think it's good enough to go on the front page of the directory (apparently sends downloads through the roof!)

toasterman

Many thanks to you SRA. Think I've finally worked out some stuff...but some bits I'm still not totally happy with.
I created a new account on blogger and wrote up the description for this week's podcast, with a link to the show. It doesn't match the rest of my site at all. I can modify templates and things but the menu on my normal site is in Flash...flash into blogger template doesn't seem to go?
I get the box the right size, but no actual flash content...

Anyway, ignoring that for the moment - I've used Feedburner with it, filled out loads of podcast bits on feedburner, and with a lot of trial and error, unsubscribing and subscribing again...worked out which bit I need to name what, in order for it to show up correctly in iTunes when I subscribe to it.

A few things I'm a bit stuck with though..
The description box for the show in iTunes seems to have a limit of..is it 255 characters?
Yet, when I used Podcast Maker to manually create my rss file, add an episode..etc.. I had an additional "summary" box of up to an additional 4000 characters, for each episode, which seemed to get added to the description info.
I can't find anything that does this on Feedburner, anywhere...am I looking in the wrong place?

I've submitted it to the iTunes directory anyway tho.. lol...because I'm impatient and I've spent all week looking at this on and off.

Thanks for your help again.
I still think rss/xml/feedburner/itunes are overly complicated.. lol.
If I had the time, I'd probably do it the way I do now probably..in html, and then use podcast maker separately..as it's really good at the iTunes side of things - perfect formatting in every box, etc. Sadly its only an unpaid hobby.

sra

toasterman wrote: »

A few things I'm a bit stuck with though..
The description box for the show in iTunes seems to have a limit of..is it 255 characters?
Yet, when I used Podcast Maker to manually create my rss file, add an episode..etc.. I had an additional "summary" box of up to an additional 4000 characters, for each episode, which seemed to get added to the description info.
I can't find anything that does this on Feedburner, anywhere...am I looking in the wrong place?

Hi

I'm not sure what you mean by description since there are several.

If you mean there's a description box to add info to when submitting your show to the Itunes directory (for their approval to then be listed) then I'm afraid I'm unsure.

If you mean description of the whole podcast then in Feedburner under the Optimize tab there's the Smartcast option on the left where you can enter the "Podcast Summary".
I seem to be able to add much more than 255 there.

If you mean the description for each individual show, The blog post on blogger should become the description for the downloaded mp3 (which you see in Itunes when you right-click a file and "Show Description").
I don't know if this is unlimited but it should be much, much more than 255.
One thing to check out on feedburner is that under the Optimize tab you have "Summary Burner" switched off. If it's on then feedburner will truncate your description to only show a small snippet.

toasterman

I switched summary burner on in the end, because although it eats into our show description, it was being cut off anyway...
So I've just put: "[ more details at <our website address> ]" in there.. so at least someone has a web address for the show to be linked to, if they found it randomly in iTunes.

I didn't get a description box during approval. It pulls all that from whatever it gets from your feed.

But it's like when you right-click an episode of something, and go "show description".
I know it is possible to make it longer because Podcast Maker would let me do it. Also I subscribed to the Skinscast (for the tv show), and their description on episode 7 is three paragraphs.

Something else that varies is the file type. I tried upload a .m4v file and linking to that. Feedburner won't link it from Blogger because it says my web host doesn't specify whether its audio or video or what. I googled this and it says its a new type of file and some hosts haven't added it as a known extension yet.
If I rename the .m4v to .m4a then it works, downloads, plays etc.
However, using Podcast Maker, with the rss file that created, that worked fine..so I guess it's not specifying something on feedburner it needs to.
I've contacted the web host and asked them to add this filetype to their listings.


We've not been approved on iTunes yet, but feedburner shows various hits throughout the day, and as I've only told one person where it is, that must mean someone is checking it.
Some of the visitors listed are interesting....
"Yes, this is FeedBurner, which means that this feed has been re-burned somewhere else."
google bots, iTunes client listed a lot, from different countries, and someone on Internet Explorer..which is very interesting the as the one person I told uses a mac on safari/firefox.

Especially interesting as the feed isn't even linked from the rest of our website at the moment..so whoever has been accessing it must surely be potential new listeners.

toasterman

Well I've been wondering about whether or not I'll be included in the iTunes podcast directory. Nothing yet and it's been a week now.

It states on the iTunes site that:
"You podcast is reviewed by iTunes staff before it goes live in the iTunes Store. If it is approved, you will receive another email, which includes a link to your podcast. The link works immediately, but your podcast is not immediately searchable. The iTunes Store servers must first index your podcast, a process which can take up to 24 hours."

And if it isn't approved? They don't tell you? I don't know how you're meant to tell if they're just slow, or they've not actually approved you. I googled it and it seems to range between 12 hours and a couple of weeks to approve new people, although Apple oddly don't give you even a rough guide as to how long it takes.

I ran my rss feed through feedvalidator.org though, and it came back with a load of errors.

I was using Feedburner and burning from a page on Blogger. I put the rss feed from Blogger into feedvalidator.org and it failed stating that the name of my site, isn't a valid email address...which is true, and I know.. but I couldn't for the life of me see where it was getting that information from... I'd certainly not filled out an "email address" box incorrectly.
It also did something else weird.. when I linked to a .m4v video file in Blogger, Feedburner gave an error that it hadn't been specified by my hosting company as a video file. Recreate the same link to the same file in Podcast Maker, and it didn't complain, it downloaded through iTunes, etc.. fine. I guess Podcast Maker specifies the type of file it is.

I'm afraid I took the lazy way out, and set up a new one using Podcast Maker. Still kept it going through Feedburner though because I like the stats it gives about daily visitors, their location, their software..etc.

My feed now validates properly, and I've resubmitted it to iTunes with the correct tags.
Here's hoping for second time lucky.
If it works and is accepted, I'll gladly hand over £20 to the makers of Podcast Maker.

Quaint1

Toasterman,
They DO Let you know when your podcast is approved - you should get an email from them which will give you the URL of your podcast on iTunes.
They are, however, having problems at the moment with new podcasts appearing in iTunes Search; I submitted a new podcast (as opposed to new episodes fo an existing podcast) and it still hasn't appeared in Search - I have emailed Apple about this and apparently they are investigating it.
I was going to point you to the "Producing Podcasts' forum on the Apple support site (where a number of peoplel are reporting the same problem) but that seems to be having problems of its own at the moment!
Au Res.,
Paul

toasterman

Thanks Paul.
I know they let you know when it's approved.. but if it isn't approved because of a fault, or for some other reason.. do they tell you?

It'd be nice if they gave an estimate of how long it took.. or at least had a link you could click to check the status of it...see they haven't forgotten all about it.