My iTunes store podcast listing is borked, the rss feed is working properly though, so use that for the time being.
I noticed the problem after uploading Follow Your Heart, and spent the next 12 hours trying to figure it out. I got it working again, kinda, I think.
There were multiple possible issues, but I couldn’t find any definite answers. Through trial and error I have decerned a few things that wreck havoc on podcast catchers and services.
- the length of audio seems to be a factor, tracks under 40 seconds will cause some services to hang and stop processing the feed
- feed aggregators are very finicky about formats and containers, many don’t know how to handle lossless ALAC encoded m4a, while processing lossy AAC encoded m4a just fine.
- some services freak out over unicode characters in a podcast title, description, or post. I had a “₀” (SUBSCRIPT ZERO Unicode: U+2080) that caused issues.
Various podcast services and catcher are working again, and while the iTunes app on OS X, and Apple’s Podcast app on iOS are working, my iTunes store listing isn’t updating. Guess it’s a wait and see game at this point.
