How To Publish a Podcast on iTunes® Music Store or to Another Web Site Using FeedForAll Mac

In addition to audio, there are 2 elements for publishing a Podcast on iTunes Music Store:

1. iTunes specified artwork
2. RSS Feed including iTunes Specific Tags

Artwork

Below are iTunes recommended specifications for the artwork that will be embedded in your RSS feed.

Podcast Cover Art

• Minimum size:
  170 pixels x 170 pixels square at 72 dpi
• Preferred size:
  300 pixels x 300 pixels at 72 dpi
• Format:
  JPG, PNG, uncompressed

RSS Feed Information

The iTunes RSS feed is based on RSS 2.0 specifications, with a few notable additions. These additional tags are not required (except to be eligible for placement on the iTunes® Home Page), but are recommended where needed in order to provide the best possible user experience, and conform with length limits.

The additional tags, specific to iTunes are:

*Additionally, there are four tags, that are not specific to iTunes, but will be displayed prominently. They are <copyright>, <language>, <link>, and <ttl>.

Using the iTunes specific tags gives you the opportunity to enhance the meta data users will see about your Podcast in iTunes. It is OK if some of the values in these tags duplicate values in similar tags that are part of RSS 2.0 specifications. All of the <itunes:> tags coexist peacefully with RSS tags and will not supersede RSS tags when publishing your Podcast somewhere other than iTunes. Many of the <itunes:> tags are applicable at both the Channel and Item elements. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Channel and Item: Channel can best be described as the show, and Item is each episode of the show.

Please use UTF-8 encoding for your feed. Other encodings are not guaranteed to work in iTunes.

All values should be in plain text (no markup or HTML). Field values will be truncated to 255 unicode characters, except for <itunes:summary> which can be up to 4,000 characters. Whitespace in values is significant, i.e. it will show in iTunes, so do not add leading or trailing whitespace to your values. CDATA sections are strongly discouraged.

When using the iTunes specific tags, you must add a namespace declaration in your RSS feed. This namespace declaration points to a document that defineds the iTunes tags. Put the following line in your feed:

<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">

Here is a table showing which tags apply to the channel (podcast) as a whole and which tags apply to individual items (episodes), along with where the tag contents appear in iTunes:

Details for the iTunes specific tags are as follows:

<itunes:enclosure>

The file extension of the url attribute of this tag is used to determine if an item should appear in the Podcast directory. Supported extensions include "m4a", "m4b", "mp3", "mov", "mp4", "m4v", and "pdf".

<itunes:guid>

Every <item> should have a Globally Unique IDentifier that never changes. When you add episodes to your feed, GUIDs are compared in case sensitive fashion to determine which episodes are new. If you omit the GUID for an episode, the episode URL will be used instead.

<itunes:category>

This tag is applicable to both Channel and Item elements.

When browsing Podcasts in the iTunes Music Store, Categories are shown in the 2nd column and Subcategories are shown in the 3rd column. Not all Categories have Subcategories.

Use a top level <itunes:category> to specify the browse category, and a nested <itunes:category> to specify the browse subcategory. Choose from the existing categories and subcategories on the iTunes Music Store.

If a nested <itunes:category> is specified, iTunes will show it in the Category column, otherwise iTunes will show the top level <itunes:category> in the Category column.

<itunes:explicit>

This tag should be used to note whether or not your Podcast contains explicit material.

There are 3 possible values for this tag: Yes, No, and Clean.

If you populate this tag with "Yes", a parental advisory tag will appear next to your Podcast cover artwork on the iTunes Music Store, and in the Name column in iTunes. If the value is "Clean", the parental advisory type is considered clean, meaning that no explicit language or adult content is included anywhere in the episodes.

This tag is applicable to both Channel & Item elements.

<itunes:new-feed-url>

This tag allows you to change the URL where the podcast feed is located. The feed format is:
<itunes:new-feed-url>http://newlocation.com/example.rss</itunes:new-feed-url>

After adding the tag to your old feed, you should maintain the old feed for 48 hours before retiring it. At that point, iTunes will have updated the directory with the new feed URL.

<itunes:pubDate>

This tag specifies the date and time when an episode was released. Proper format for this tag is:
Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:00:00 GMT

<itunes:subtitle>

At the Channel level, this tag is a short description that provides general information about the Podcast. The contents of this tag is shown in the Description coumn in iTunes, as such it looks best if it is only a few words long.

At the Item level, this tag is a short description that provides specific information for each episode.

Limited to 255 characters or less, plain text, no HTML

<itunes:summary>

The contents of this tage is shown in a separate window that appears when the ⓘ (circle i) in the Description column is clicked. It also appears on the iTunes Music Store page for your podcast.

At the Channel level, this tag is a long description that will appear next to your Podcast cover art when a user selects your Podcast.

At the Item level, this tag is a long description that will be displayed in an expanded window when users click on an episode.

Limited to 4000 characters or less, plain text, no HTML

<itunes:author>

At the Channel level this tag contains the name of the person or company that is most widely attributed to publishing the Podcast and will be displayed in the Artist column in iTunes.

If applicable, at the item level, this tag can contain information about the person(s) featured on a specific episode.

<itunes:duration>

The contents of this tag are shown in the Time column in iTunes.

The tag can be formatted: HH:MM:SS, H:MM:SS, MM:SS, or M:SS (H = hours, M = minutes, S = seconds).

This tag is applicable to the Item element only.

<itunes:keywords>

This tag allows users to search on text keywords.

Limited to 255 characters or less, plain text, no HTML. Separate words with commas.

This tag is applicable to both Channel and Item elements.

<itunes:owner>

This tag contains information that will be used to contact the owner of the Podcast for communication specifically about their Podcast on iTunes.

It will not be publicly displayed on iTunes.

This tag is applicable to the Channel element only.

<itunes:email>
Required element specifying the email address of the owner.
<itunes:name>
Optional element specifying the name of the owner.

<itunes:image>

This tag specifies the artwork for the Channel and Item(s). This artwork can be larger than the maximum allowed by RSS. Hence the custom tag.

Put the urlto the image in href attribute. The url must end in ".jpg" or ".png".

Details on the size recommendations are in the section below.

Preferred size:
300 pixels x 300 pixels at 72 dpi
Minimum size:
170 pixels x 170 pixels square at 72 dpi
Format:
JPEG, PNG, uncompressed

<itunes:block>

Use this inside an <item> element to prevent that episode from appearing in the iTunes Podcast directory. Use this inside a <channel> element to prevent the entire podcast from appearing in the iTunes Podcast directory.

<language>

Because iTunes operates sites worldwide, it is critical to specify the language of a podcast. Accepted values are those in the ISO 639-1 Alpha-2 (two-letter language codes). These language codes can be found clicking here.

<ttl>

The ttl tag stands for "time-to-live". It is an optional integer value that controls how many minutes iTunes will wait between checking for changes in a podcast. if no time-to-live is seet on the podcast, the updater job assumes a time-to-live of 24 hours.

<copyright>

This tag contains copyright information about your Podcast.

The tag is free text and can include dates, for example: Apple Computer 2005.

You do not need to include the copyright symbol in the tag, it will automatically be displayed in iTunes.

<link>

This tag contains the link to your website and will be displayed next to your Podcast cover art.

Below is some additional information that is relevant to how your Podcast will be displayed in iTunes:

Please use UTF-8 encoding for your feed. If you are using a Unicode capable text editor you can edit and save the file as UTF-8 directly. The only characters that require escaping in XML content are &, <, and >.

Feeds are XML, not HTML. One important difference is XML does not support "named character entities", like &copy; for © and &trade; for ™, except for the following:

& // ampersand & (Unicode U+0026)
&lt; // less-than sign < (Unicode U+003C)
&gt; // greater-than sign > (Unicode U+003E)
&apos; // apostrophe ' (Unicode U+0027)
&quot; // quotation mark " (Unicode U+0022)

In XML you need to use numeric character references, which look like:

&#NN; // where NN is the Unicode for the character in decimal (base 10)
&#xNN; // where NN is the Unicode for the character in hexadecimal (base 16)

for example:

&#38; // ampersand &
&#xA9; // copyright sign © (in hexadecimal)
&#169; // copyright sign © (in decimal)
&#x2117; // sound recording copyright ℗
&#x2122; // trade mark sign ™

For further reference:

Below is a sample RSS 2.0 feed that includes the additional iTunes specific tags: