[Plugin: Podcast Channels] Testing Feedback

I noticed that getID3() is included with the plugin; couldn’t this be used to pull item-level itunes:author from the ID3 tags?

I tag all these files meticulously in iTunes before uploading them in the first place; it’s a shame this information has be set again by various means on the server…

Thanks!

When the podcast is expanded, clicking on the channel summary (‘i’ in Description) shows the correct value specified in the plugin settings.

However when the podcast is collapsed, clicking on the ‘i’ shows the whole body of the post. I assume this is the value of the item summary.

just for ref, i’ve been using this as my source https://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/specs.html

right then

#1
“Channel Summary appears in iTunes for the Item Subtitle (Description)”

this shouldn’t be how PodChan behaves. the iTunes item description is taken from the item’s post text – it should show the first 250 characters. the item summary (what you get when you click the i on an item) is the whole post.

let me know if the text in an item does NOT match the post text

#2
“When clicking on the ‘i’ for either the channel or item, I find the whole body of the post”

again this isn’t how it’s behaving here. it’s MEANT to do that for the items, but for the channel it should be the summary text as defined in the PodChan admin interface.

your observations #1 and #2 might be because your first post and your summary look similar?

#3
“Notice that item category is set to ‘El Tintero’ or the category name, rather than the Category specified for the channel in settings”

This is intended – as the apple spec says nothing about item categories, only channel categories. I haven’t actually tried adding the itunes:category to items because apple says (link above) that its not valid to do so. However iTunes does pick up and display the regular (non itunes) ‘category’ info in the item RSS (which WP sets to your various post categories). i could put in an option to suppress this entirely – looking at other pro-podcasts i subscribe too, item categories are entirely blank.

#4
Authors per item – absolutely. The way I have done this in PodChan is totally wrong headed! In the next release I will let the post author display name become the item author, but include an option to let the category author override that if wanted. (which is what it currently does.) Thanks for pointing this out – i have already been playing with how best to implement the ‘override’ option (that i want, but i can see being a minority requirement)

#5
itunes:subtitle at the item level – this is the same as point #1 i think. PodChan code definitely uses the text of the post for the item level subtitle

ID3 tags and author – good point. I think the point #3 in your first point takes precedence though. The post author should be (by default) the item author. i WILL change this soon. (Just done this in v0.25 committed now)

I am thinking now though that i could offer THREE options for the author of an item: 1) use the WP post author, 2) use the PodChan category author, 3) use the enclosure’s ID3 tags ‘author info’. getting too complex?

“However when the podcast is collapsed, clicking on the ‘i’ shows the whole body of the post. I assume this is the value of the item summary.”

this is iTunes behaviour. when collapsed it should show a concatenation of the summary for the channel and the most recent item.

another observation WRT item author in iTunes, is that when an enclosure is downloaded, the author field is set to the value in the ID3 tags.

I notice that some pro-podcasts i subscribe to leave item author blank, others match the ID3 tags, but not consistently. don’t know what this means in terms of deciding what to do in Podcast Channels – i’m liking the reading in of ID3 tags and giving the three options i was imagining ^^ up there.

hmm ??

Thanks again for your replies. I have been referencing the same spec.

#4
I would expect ID3 tags to be the default authority for item-level meta and any web-app logic an override. This comes from a perspective of work flow; the file is managed locally before uploading to the server. Why do the work twice? I can see how some would prefer to set item author to post author but that should be a an override provided as a convenience, what do you think?

#3
I see in the iTunes spec that item category isn’t supported; didn’t notice that before. I’ve been using the podcasts I subscribe to as models; they all have item category set to Music even when they have multiple channels. Would love to know how they do that. Given the choice between displaying the WP post category and being blank, I’d go with blank.

#1,3,5 (Subtitle and Summary)
I’ve just discovered that with Feedburner’s Smartcast feature turned off things work a little better:
channel subtitle (itunes description) = Subtitle (pod-chan)
channel summary (itunes ‘i’ in description) = Summary (pod-chan)
item subtitle = truncated post text
item summary = post text

When Smartcast is turned on the channel subtitle gets set to Summary.

So working with Smartcast off for the moment, things look like they are behaving the way you built them.

I would argue that 250 character have no place in the iTunes Description column. How do you read it all? Apple says, “The subtitle displays best if it is only a few words long.”

Also, your logic for item subtitle sets unfortunate demands on the way posts are written. Rather than begin the post with some prose and have these first 250 chars appear as irrelevant text in iTunes Description for that episode, I have to begin my post with a summary (ie, “This week we focus on the music of SoAndSo”) and even then the balance of 250 chars appears in iTunes.

Would it be difficult to add a text field for item subtitle? If not, how about set it to the value of post excerpt rather than truncating the post body?

As for item summary, I can understand the logic for including the entire post text, but can we filter out the WordPress markup such as ‘caption’ and ‘audio’ (the second being markup for wpaudioplayer)?

Whew. Thanks!

item author
i’m already working on reading the ID3 ‘artist’ tag, and then will offer ‘post author/channel author/ID3 artist’ i think. this will be a site default that will inherit, so you need only set it for the site, but can override per channel. (on the way i noticed more 2.7 issues when reading ID3 tags of attachments which will be fixed in the next release)

item category
i’ll see if it’s easy to suppress the WP cats, and if so, again this could be another multi-option field per channel.

item subtitle
totally agree with you – and i did have ‘post excerpt’ in mind exactly! with no post excerpt i could use the truncated post content. and to be nicer, truncated post content up to the ‘more’ tag would be nicer.

item summary
i’ve been thinking about filtering out some bits and pieces like that. esp the wpaudioplayer [audio: xxxx] markup. what’s the caption markup?

sounds great. let me know when i can test it for you ??

caption appears when you insert an image from the wordpress media gallery.

one more item i came across: i thought it made sense to group my podcasts under a parent category called, surprisingly, Podcasts. However, this parent category doesn’t appear in the ‘Add Channel’ drop down category list so I can’t configure feed settings for a channel which would contain content for all podcasts. make sense?

cheers!

oo, it should do. i also have an overarching category and can select that from the dropdown ok – i will check to see if there are conditions under which parent categories won’t appear. it uses wp_dropdown_categories() – will check if that’s still the right way to do it.

I have committed another update to the dev version. This adds in ‘Episode category’ and ‘Episode author’ options

ep cats: post cat / channel cat / blank
ep author: post author / channel author / media artist

media artist is read from the ID3 tags and is editable in the media library

(not found out about the issue with the drop-down add category menu yet – sorry)

I have installed the latest dev version but don’t see where ‘ep cats’ and ‘ep author’ are in the UI. Not in the channel ‘add field’ drop down.

just upgraded using WP auto upgrade to .26 and these field appear. I have set the following and will test.
ep cats = channel cat
ep author = media artist

I use FTP to upload my media since they are 80MB so I have installed the Add To Server plugin to import files into the WP Media Library. In Media Library I have specified the Artist for the file and in Podcast Channels I have specified the following settings:

Episode category: channel cat
Episode author: media artist

By the way, these should be drop down menus, instead of free text fields, right?

After saving and resubscribing to the feed in iTunes, the only change I see is that both channel artist and episode artist appear as post author. Episode category continues to be post category.

So I’ve been doing testing on the behavior of enclosures and files in the Media Library, and I just came back to Podcast-Channels and the text fields for ep-cat and ep-author have changed to drop downs! Low and behold the defaults were not what I wanted to I set them to:

Episode category: Channel categories
Episode author: Media artist

Resynced Feedburner… and pow! Episode Artist and Category are as I want them to be. Whew.

But… Channel Category now shows up as Media Artist. How to fix?

I just received notice from Apple that our feed has been approved in the iTunes Store. All the tags look great except for item subtitle (still shows truncated post text). Would be great if this could be set to post excerpt or content until ‘more’ tag.