Series: iTunes Podcast Issue

I’ve been struggling with my iTunes Podcast listing for a while now. Here’s the continuing saga.

Feed Issues

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series iTunes Podcast Issue

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.

Feed Issues Update

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series iTunes Podcast Issue

I think I finally have my iTunes store podcast listing straightened out. Something about not having PowerPress display the media player and download links in my posts and having a YouTube embed instead. Once I allowed the media player to display the iTunes store listing refreshed with my latest episodes.

It shouldn’t work that way, no other directory had a problem. But…what works, works, I guess. Sadly I know have both the PowerPress player and the YouTube player in my podcast posts. I’m trying to figure out what to do about that. I’ll be leaving it for the time being, and maybe, hopefully, I’ll get it sorted out one of these days. For now I’m just thankful the listing has finally updated.

Nope, broken again

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series iTunes Podcast Issue

For Pete’s Sake! my iTunes store listing is broken again. The podcast feed is working correctly. I think Apple has a cacheing issue going on. Everything is good on my end—I’ve checked and rechecked over a course of weeks. I followed all the advice Apple Support sent me, and at for a brief moment it started working again and displayed the most up to date list, but it suddenly reverted. If you subscribe in iTunes you’ll still be able to pull down the most recent episodes even though they’re not listed in iTS.

Google Play is working correctly as is Podbay, and others.

Does iTunes Store use Google webcache?

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series iTunes Podcast Issue

Still having problems with my iTunes Podcast listing.

Oddly enough, the old version of my podcast feed that is showing up in the iTunes store is an exact duplicate of the one that Google has cached.

Could it be that the iTunes Store podcast directory uses the Google web cache?

I’m submitted a cache removal request for the feed, should take about a day to go through, we’ll see then.

A Tale of Woe and Triumph

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series iTunes Podcast Issue

I have a take of woe
And triumph!
In my quest to get my iTunes Store podcast listing to refresh, I broke my site 🙁
Here’s the short version Continue reading A Tale of Woe and Triumph