Journal: News & Comment

Getting Apple to accept your podcast into its directory

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Anders in Norway found a fix for when Apple's iTunes Podcast directory won't accept your podcast feed:

I had this problem as well, even when using the Apple supplied example from their PDF. The fix was to remove the categories outside the item tag. (ie: categories only inside an item) I wasted a day on that one right there.

In other words, if you use Apple's new <itunes:category text="Music" /> element inside your podcast feed (no matter what's inside the quotes), make sure it only applies to individual <item> elements, not to the overall <channel>—even though Apple indicates otherwise in their podcast specifications (PDF).

In other words, when iTunes says, "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later," it really means, "You followed our instructions, but they were wrong and we won't tell you how to fix them." Whoops.

Still, it's good that it works in the end, and I hope Apple makes the effort to go beyond just the big media podcasts over time.

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