Podpress – itunes fields and cover art missing

Hi Anthony,

look on the Feed/iTunes Settings page for those settings. This page has 2 main sections.
The first one “Settings for the default Feeds” contains settings to customize the default feeds of your blog like /?feed=rss2 or /?feed=atom.
The second section is called “podPress Feeds” which contains the settings for the Feeds which podPress adds to the blog like the /?feed=podcast.

So if you should configure the settings in both sections to get an a comparable appearance of all feeds.

The difference between the main blog feeds and e.g. the podcast feed is that the main feeds contain always all posts while the podcast feed contains by default only the posts with podcast episodes added with podPress.

The podPress Feeds section contains by default feed like the enhancedpodcast and torrent feed. If you don’t need them, you can deactivate them.

Regards,
Tim

Hi Tim, are you the author? (if you are I just want to say nice things about your prog)

I believe I have done what you describe, indeed I have looked over and over and no joy just yet. Probably missing the obvious; but cannot see for looking.

As a complete first time novice I can let you know that the settings page is very easy to use, but confuses me about when or even if to use each section and to what each section is supposed to relate. This last is probably because the intended purposes are not recognised or known by me (yet).

Thank you very much for your reply and so quickly.

Anthony https://mellor.co

Anthony,

some settings are not explained very well. I will try to change that in future versions.

I have took a look at the Feeds of your blog and it seems that you have configured nearly all things right.
The main feed (https://mellor.co/feed/) contains your image. But the size of the RSS image should be 144×144 pixels and the itunes:image version of it should be 300×300 pixels or bigger like 600×600.
That feed contains “Tax, Accounts, Bookkeeping, analyse for profit.” as the standard description and a longer text as the iTunes:summary (it starts with “Small business Questions answered by […]”).

But you have marked the podcast feed (https://mellor.co/feed/podcast) as a premium feed. Don’t do that unless you know that you want to do that. Furthermore if you want to use that function then you should activate it at the general settings page of podPress.
But both options are not activated/checked by default.

Which of the Feeds of your blog is registered at the iTunes Store?

Cover Art is a part of each mp3 file. You need to add the cover to each media file e.g. with the iTunes client software on your computer. iTunes client software does not take the image from the feed as cover art. Only the iTunes Store uses the image URL which you have defined as itunes:image for the page of your podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/anthony-mellor-fca-chartered/id425345062
If you want to change that itunes:image use always a different file name. Because the iTunes Store will discover the modification better this way.
To add the cover art to a media files open the iTunes client software right-click on the media file and choose the menu point “Information” (that name might be different in the English version of iTunes). After that a little window opens and you can add the cover image in the tab “Cover” (or “Cover Art”).

but still descriptions […] do not appear.

Why do you think that? Where do the descriptions not appear? (the descriptions of the episodes or the description of the feed?)

Tim

ps: I’m not the original author. But I’m responsible for the modifications since version 8.8.3.

Tim,

I think you explain the settings well enough in themselves, it is the “first time user” (i.e. me) who lacks the big picture, the context.

You used a great expression in your reply above where you said “Don’t do that unless you know that you want to do that”. You go directly to the core of my trouble, not being at all clear what I want to do to achieve my goal – and of course I risk breaking things in the process.

I have unchecked “premium feed”, which was checked by me in an attempt to solve my little issues described above.

I don’t think I would suggest you change anything in the settings; merely add some overview guidance at the beginning of each section answering that question about whether I want to use or change anything therein, making clear where sections start and end as you do with the ones that collapse/expand.

Pixels. Just love “pixels”. Have no idea what they mean and how to get a picture to be this or that many pixels in any direction. Black magic to me. Is it file size related? I guess not. All this in the context of many years playing with images.

I have used “Tax, Accounts …etc” as a standard description in every box because I have no idea which descriptions will appear where and in what circumstances, and indeed they have not appeared where I was hoping in any case.. I think.

I don’t know which of my feeds is registered with the iTunes store because I was not aware I have more than one. (Making me quite without hope I know).

I can see from the cover art link you gave me that it is not updating podcasts as I had hoped, so presumably I have mixed my feeds? I have only one podcast series I am aware of, so any others are simply me not knowing which is the correct description of a feed (there are so many!).

“Only the iTunes Store uses the image URL which you have defined as itunes:image for the page of your podcast”

ok, I achieved that by luck rather than good management. Did I do that in iTunes or in Podpress?

I had found the “cover art add” in iTunes, but while it shows on my own iTunes client version of my podcasts I have no way of knowing if it goes anywhere else? I’d like the same image on everything, frightening though it is to young children and animals (edit for readers: this is a humourous reference to a photo of myself as seen aside this post)

“
but still descriptions […] do not appear.

Why do you think that? Where do the descriptions not appear? (the descriptions of the episodes or the description of the feed?) “

This is upon pressing the tags button that shows underneath each WordPress page, where it says updates may be slow if loading from remote sites.

I hope the above helps us both, I have tried to describe for you the “first time user” experience for myself as I know it can be very useful to a developer who can never be a first time user and yet strives to make it easy for us; which is a tall order.

The fact I have a podcast “out there” is a credit to your work, as I am also a new WordPress user to boot.

Anthony

Here is the exact place – also not showing my mug shot, but pp image instead.

https://www.anthonymellor.com/Snapshot.jpg

The above is not yet published, sitting as a draft in WP.

I am of course perfectly happy to ack pp.

Anthony

Hi nthony,

I have unchecked “premium feed”,

That is good. The https://mellor.co/feed/podcast feed works now.

But the title of your podcast at the iTunes Store is “Anthony Mellor FCA – Chartered Accountant 30 Years ? Podcast”. That is why I think that you have registered the RSS feed of the category with the name Podcast (https://mellor.co/category/anthonyanswers/feed/) at the iTunes Store. (The slug of this category is “anthonyanswers” but the nice name is “Podcast”.)

WordPress produces a Feed for each category and if you put all your posts with podcast episodes manually into this category then this feed will contain all your podcasts and no other posts. This feed will probably have the same content as the Feed with the Feed Name “Podcast Feed” and the URL https://mellor.co/feed/podcast. But this feed will contain all posts which have at least one media file attached with podPress regardless of the categories of the posts. For instance if you add an episode with podPress to a post which is not in your Podcast category then this post is going to appear in the https://mellor.co/feed/podcast Feed but not in https://mellor.co/category/anthonyanswers/feed/.

My notice regarding the pixels of the image files is maybe not that important. But some Feed Readers may not show Feed images which are not in the resolution as recommended in the RSS specification.
There are numerous ways to scale an image to the right number of pixels. It depends on the software you want to use. I’m using GIMP to scale images. I have found a how-to in the documentation: Scale image with GIMP.

But it seems that iTunes can handle the current image. As you can see here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/anthony-mellor-fca-chartered/id425345062 The image on this page is no cover art. It is the itunes:image which you have set at the page where you can modify and set the details of the category with the nice name Podcast.

The screenshot shows the podPress box below the post editor box. It shows the detected ID3 information of the media file and if this media file does not contain a cover image then podPress displays the default image. But podPress does not add this image to the file.
Does this media files in the screenshot have a cover image?

I have googled for “adding cover art with itunes” and found some guides which explain how-to add cover art to songs and albums probably better than I have done it. Maybe try this one: https://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/ss/album_artwork_6.htm
There also screencasts which show how-to do this e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpdUcxUdTNw

The image which you add e.g. with iTunes to a media file will be the one which is going to be displayed e.g. in the Cover Flow view of iTunes

You can change all the other ID3 data like the description with iTunes too. Some podcasters add the description of an episode as Lyrics to the files.

I have used “Tax, Accounts …etc” as a standard description in every box because I have no idea which descriptions will appear where and in what circumstances

In this overview https://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#commontags you can see at least where the iTunes settings will appear.
The description or tagline of the blog or the category will not appear in iTunes. But other feed readers show it. I’m view feeds with the Mozilla FireFox browser before I subscribe to them and the Firefox shows the description and not the iTunes:summary.

About the premium feature of podPress: It something that was a part of the plugin long before I have started to maintain it and I do not like it because of its limited benefits. I think the original idea behind it was to give podcasters the possibility to offer premium episodes which are only available to a limited group of listeners. But this function does not protect the files from unauthorized users. It is only useful in combination with other measures which podPress does not provide. (But this is explained below the option at the general settings page of podPress)
I have written this not helpful statement because of my doubts about the use of this function.
But thanks to your questions I have learned that I should add a notice near the checkboxes in the podPress Feeds section.

Thanks,
Tim

btw: Please, use the the “b-quote” button to mark citation of previous posts. If you click on it and you have marked nothing then a <blockquote> appears in the editor box and the button changes a little bit. Copy and paste the text passage which you want to cite and click again on this button. A </blockquote> will appear and close the citation paragraph.

will do thanks – wondered what that was.

Please explain “nice name” – what is the meaning of “nice” in this context? (Perhaps the “URL-friendly version” of the category name?)

Yes before I discovered PodPress I was using the feature to podcast a “category” (I think) and also you have reminded me about this in that now I see I have forgotten to add the “podcast” category to all my later podcast posts; which I assume is why nothing was updating.

WordPress produces a Feed for each category and if you put all your posts with podcast episodes manually into this category then this feed will contain all your podcasts and no other posts. This feed will probably have the same content as the Feed with the Feed Name “Podcast Feed” and the URL https://mellor.co/feed/podcast. But this feed will contain all posts which have at least one media file attached with podPress regardless of the categories of the posts. For instance if you add an episode with podPress to a post which is not in your Podcast category then this post is going to appear in the https://mellor.co/feed/podcast Feed but not in https://mellor.co/category/anthonyanswers/feed/.

Forgive me: I want to “feed a category”, my “podcast” category, to iTunes etc, so which feed will do that and only that? I think you have answered above, but I cannot see it.

I will play with Gimp, thanks.

But it seems that iTunes can handle the current image. As you can see here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/anthony-mellor-fca-chartered/id425345062 The image on this page is no cover art. It is the itunes:image which you have set at the page where you can modify and set the details of the category with the nice name Podcast.

My iTunes client was not showing my “cover art” image of myself until I added it to the mp3 files locally. Of course now I am no longer sure if I filled in the URL in PodPress settings later or earlier. I completed some but maybe not all instances of the image link (example of me not knowing what to expect).

The image which you add e.g. with iTunes to a media file will be the one which is going to be displayed e.g. in the Cover Flow view of iTunes

Does this mean the “cover flow” and the Podcast “cover” can be different?

You can change all the other ID3 data like the description with iTunes too. Some podcasters add the description of an episode as Lyrics to the files.

Is this done using the (my) localiTunes client working directly on the mp3 file? And then the mp3 file must be uploaded with all its tags prepared? If this includes an image, where does that appear?

You can change all the other ID3 data like the description with iTunes too. Some podcasters add the description of an episode as Lyrics to the files.

I wondered if that would be useful, thank you for the tip.

If I understand you, I think you are saying that there are two streams of information: one is the ID3 tag data entered via iTunes and saved with and within the mp3 file, which is then used when listeners download the podcast to iTunes (or any other client that reads ID3 metadata), two is the data I enter into PodPress and can be similar if not the same as the data entered as ID3 tags, but which is not read by iTunes, but by other RSS readers such as you mention. ?

Thank you for your patience, I may yet come to use PodPress in an understanding way rather than good luck.

Best wishes,

Anthony

With “nice name” I mean the name which gets displayed when you open the view of posts of one category. If you open the view of the category Podcast (https://mellor.co/category/anthonyanswers/) then you will see below the Header section with the big image and the navigation menu the line “Category Archives: Podcast”. Podcast is the name of the category. But the slug (name) of the category is totally different like you can see in the URL above. It is “anthonyanswers”. That is unusual because the default slug would be “podcast”. That is nothing bad. But it was surprising to me. The slug name is the “nice name” clean from non Latin characters with the exception for a few characters like the underscore. But you can find a more complete definition of the term slug in the Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug_%28web_publishing%29) or in the WP glossary (https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Glossary#Slug)
The “nice name” is the display name which can contain all sorts of characters. But that term is probably not a common term in the English language. I believe I have found it somewhere in the source code of WP.
Anyway, I meant the name of the category.

I want to “feed a category”, my “podcast” category, to iTunes etc, so which feed will do that and only that?

The category feed (https://mellor.co/category/anthonyanswers/feed/). (You have most likely registered that feed already as your podcast feed at the iTunes Store.)

Does this mean the “cover flow” and the Podcast “cover” can be different?

The Cover Flow is a view option in the iTunes client software. If you choose that view, iTunes will display the images which are embedded into the media files in a certain way. If media files have no embedded image then iTunes will display only a placeholder image.
These embedded images can be different from the image you use as the RSS Image or the iTunes:Image. (These are names of options at the settings pages of podPress. Do you mean by Podcast “cover” these options?)

Is this done using the (my) localiTunes client working directly on the mp3 file?

Yes.

And then the mp3 file must be uploaded with all its tags prepared?

Yes.

If this includes an image, where does that appear?

For instance in the Cover Flow view of the iTunes client software of your listeners or their iPods, iPhones etc.. But other music players and music playing software which is from Apple will show these images too.

You are almost right in you conclusion about the two streams of information.
The data you enter in podPress will be visible at the page of your podcast in the iTunes Store (and in other RSS readers).

Regards,
Tim

ps: I know that my English is not good. I’m sorry. Please ask, if something is unclear and I will try to find different words.

ps: I know that my English is not good. I’m sorry. Please ask, if something is unclear and I will try to find different words.

Your English is very good Tim; what is your mother tongue? I have been trying to guess from your choice of words and syntax, but cannot see it.

Anthony

It would be easier for me to answer all the questions in German.