iTunes stares blankly at Atom podcasts
July 12th, 2005
I was disappointed to discover that while it has no problem interpreting podcasts distributed as RSS 2.0 with <enclosure> tags, iTunes completely ignores Atom feeds with <link rel="enclosure"> elements. In fact, it’s pretty darned insensitive when it comes to parsing feeds in general. (Boo-urns, as Chris would say.)
See for yourself with my simple demonstration podcasts (don’t get used to it; this is the only podcast I’ll ever do):
3 responses
[...] [Also please see my own beef with iTunes’ podcast support: Atom feeds need not apply.] [...]
comment posted at 8:24 pm on 13 Jul 2005
[...] John LeMasney asked a good question during my RSS and Atom presentation last night to the Princeton Linux Users Group that I didn’t know how to answer. Do Podcast clients, especially iTunes, support Atom Podcasts yet? I know Atom has the necessary elements but do the clients recognize them? Personally I don’t really listen to podcasts because I simply prefer reading and writing to speaking and listening, so I’m not up on all the latest developments in this space. Dan Sandler claims it doesn’t. He seems to be right. We need to convince Apple to fix this. [...]
comment posted at 5:06 pm on 28 May 2008
Actually, iTunes handles Atom podcasts fine, although it is picky about their standards compliance. I edited your atom file to be valid and posted it here:
http://zacharycrockett.com/audio/dsandler.atom
New feed is valid:
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fzacharycrockett.com%2Faudio%2Fdsandler.atom
Original feed isn’t valid:
http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdsandler.org%2Foutgoing%2Fpodcast.atom
What I changed:
- Atom namespace is http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom.
- Added an id element to the feed (not just the entry).
- Used real uuids in both the feed and the entry. I doubt iTunes cares about this, but it’s easy — on a Mac, just type uuidgen in the Terminal.
- Changed the MIME type of the enclosure to audio/mpeg, since audio/mp3 is not a registered MIME type. See http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/ as the official list and http://www.w3schools.com/media/media_mimeref.asp as a more useful list with file extensions.
- Changed the summary tag to be the content tag, since summary is optional, while content is required.
comment posted at 8:06 pm on 09 Jun 2008