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podPress, iTunes and the FeedID

For those of you struggling with podPress, wait no further. Well, you’ll have to wait anyway, but here’s some things you should know:

FeedID:

You’ll have to wait. It takes time for Apple and iTunes to check out your podcast. For me, I had to wait 3 days before I received a reply from iTunes regarding my feedID. Of course, that doesn’t mean your podcast can be found on iTunes.

iTunes:

It takes even longer to become search-able on iTunes. For me, I was finally able to search for my podcast after 5 days. So far, I do not understand the way the iTunes search function works. I know that the title and artist of my podcast are unique, so it took me by surprise that my podcast did not come up as the number one hit. For some reason, my podcast rang-in at number 15. And I searched for it. Specifically.

iTunes Summary:

When I posted the initial podcast with podPress, I was not aware of any HTML issues with my description. However, one must be aware of special characters in your Summary. Special characters, such as quotations, ampersands and apostrophes do not get encoded properly when the iTunes Summary is initially sent to iTunes.

You have to encode the special characters using the UTF-8 or HTML descriptors. Why? Well, the podcast feed is sent in in an XML format and we all know how picky XML is. So, even the though your podPress preview looks OK, you better swap out those special characters or it will take FOREVER before iTunes displays your iTunes Summary correctly.

ID3 Tags:

podPress can pull the ID3 tag information from your MP3, so it is probably best if you can edit your podcasts’s ID3 tag before uploading it. I have imported and burned far too many mp3’s, only the realize the data I’ve imported into iTunes did NOT get imported into the mp3 file itself. What does this mean?

If you are using Windows, then use Winamp or MediaMonkey to embed your mp3’s with the right information. Using a Mac? Well, good luck as all I’ve seen so far is ID3X and their website no longer appears to work. If anyone has a good MP3 ID3 tag editor for Mac OSX, then please pass it along.

Happy podcasting. 🙂

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