iTunes 4.9 supports podcasts

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I was so excited this morning when I upgraded my iTunes software to see the new podcasting feature of the iTunes Music Store, and saw that The Animation Podcast is listed! Now there’s a place where all my shows are available in one easy list. I haven’t downloaded anything yet, but it looks super easy (hey, Apple made it). Now I’ve got to learn how to fill in a bit of information they don’t have from me, but thaz cool nazgul.

I’m not going to trash my iPodder and iPodderX just yet, but if this works the way it should, I don’t see much use for them anymore. This may be the simplest way to find and subscribe to many different podcasts so check it out and let me know what you think.

Here’s the link to The Animation Podcast at the iTunes Music Store. (The link only works on a computer that has iTunes installed.)

Comments

23 responses to “iTunes 4.9 supports podcasts”

June 28, 2005

Lamont

I just discovered the upgrade on iTunes myself, and so far so good. I’m in the process of downloading all the previous shows, just to have them nice and organized in iTunes! And I’m stoked about iTunes joining in with Podcasts. I’m always all for using one program for multiple things!

Keep up the awesome shows, Clay!

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June 29, 2005

Question

I saw your posting on the iTunes upgrade. Is this only for the mac version? I can’t seem to locate it on the PC version.

Also I wanted to let you know how much I enjoy your show. Keep up the great work. : )

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June 29, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

Lamont, thanks for letting us know it works.

Mal, you know, I don’t know if it’s only for the Mac. If anyone else knows, let me know. Also, be sure that you have the latest verion of iTunes (4.9 as of today). I’m pretty sure it’s for both platforms. Here’s the link to download iTunes.

-Clay

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June 30, 2005

Bruce

It’s great, Clay. I love the new itunes, it handles podcasts. I tossed iPodder the minute I got my podcasts entered into itunes. The interface is so far and away easier than ipodder, plus I don’t have the second step of importing the tracks into itunes. A great move from Apple.

Also, the interesting thing is that we may eventually have a structure to have a paid subscription to a podcast. I think that’ll bring over some more premium content. I can see some great new things coming from that model.

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July 3, 2005

David

The podcast feed (http://www.animationpodcast.com/podcast.xml) is currently broken.
Firefox gives me the following error message:

XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: .
Location: http://www.animationpodcast.com/podcast.xml
Line Number 15, Column 11:
———-^

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July 3, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

David,
the XML file isn’t something that is viewable in a browser. Instead, it should be copied and pasted in to a podcast client like iPodder or iPodderX.
You can find more at this post:
http://www.animationpodcast.com/what-is-a-podcast/
Let me know if it doesn’t work with those programs.
-Clay

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July 3, 2005

Dave Anderson

I know there is nothing new to download but iTunes gives me an error when I hit the update button. It has done this with other podcasts and then a couple days later was fine. iPodder has no problems so I suspect that iTunes needs some work still.

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July 3, 2005

David

Looks like there has been a bit of a misunderstanding. I know that the podcast feed is not intended for viewing in a Browser, but it should be a well-formed XML file.

The actual problem is that iTunes 4.9 complains about an invalid podcast feed when I hit the update button, so I checked the feed with Firefox, which detected an XML parsing errror.
With the error message given by Firefox you should be able to find and fix the errors in the podcast feed rather quickly.

By the way, there are additional errors besides the one noted above (Firefox only displays the first one it can find).
For example, the tags are closed with , which is clearly a typo.

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July 3, 2005

David

Oops, the tags in the last sentence have been eaten by the CMS… 😉
The itunes:subtitle tags are closed with itunes:subtitile (note the additional “i”).

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July 3, 2005

David

You can get a fixed version of the feed here:
http://darkstar.stw-bonn.de/~neo/podcast.xml

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July 3, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

Thank you so much David. I’ve replaced the xml with your fixed version. I hope that works.
-Clay

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July 3, 2005

Valerio

please don’t drop iPodder, it’s open, free and multi platform; it’s the only way (by now) that we linux users can access your podcasts.
pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease

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July 3, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

Oh, don’t worry about that Valerio, I’m just trying to add to the feed so that iTunes is supported. It will always work in other other programs. Thanks for the note though, I appreciate it.
-Clay

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July 4, 2005

Dave Anderson

Yeah that seemed to work. No more error in iTunes. 🙂

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July 4, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

Thanks David. I also realized that I left out an iTunes specific tag at the start, so I added that and hopefully now iTunes will pick that up and my page will have all the bells and whistles it should display. What a pain, all this technical stuff.
-Clay

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July 5, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

Well it only took a few hours but the xml feed finally seems to work in iTunes. There’s even the album art and everything. Again, I want to thank David for pointing me in the right direction. Also, if anyone out there is looking for help publishing their own podcast on iTunes, this site was extremely useful for checking the feed:
http://www.nobodylikesonions.com/feedcheck/
If anyone else is experiencing anything odd with the feed, please let me know.
-Clay

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July 5, 2005

justin

I was introduced to the animation podcast via iTunes — I would not have found it otherwise. Very glad it is on there, and it works like a charm for me.

Keep up the great work Clay!

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July 5, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

Thanks for the note Justin. What a relief to know someone found it and it worked, no questions asked.
-Clay

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July 13, 2005

bugs

Hello,

Sorry for going off topic, but I wanted to make a request.

Could you do an interview with Joe Moshier about character design and drawing?

I know it’s not exactly animation, but I still think it would be interesting.

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July 13, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

bugs,
I’ll do what I can to get Joe to do it. He’s one of my best friends, so he doesn’t really have a choice – I’ll make him do the show. Character design is absolutely animation related, we’ll just have to find a way to present it over audio.
-Clay

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July 23, 2005

Don-Don

….while we’re on the subject of requests, any chance of getting James Baxter? I think he’s one of the most amazing animators and it would be really interesting to hear him speak, especially now that he’s embarked on creating his own studio:

http://www.jamesbaxteranimation.com/main.html

..sorry if ive posted in the wrong place and thank you so much Clay for this amazing resource, I check it every day in fevered excitement in the hope of new shows!

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July 23, 2005

AnimationPodcaster

Don-Don –

Yes.

-Clay

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July 23, 2005

Don-Don

Wow! is that a yes to getting James Baxter on?
what a fast reply! thank you so much. And although I check the site everyday I understand that people may under-appreciate just how long it takes to create these shows, much like the art of animation itself, so I will try to be patient…

…and I do really appreciate what you are doing, Hearing these wonderful artists speak is to gain insightful gems of information that would previously only have been available to the animation assistants or people who worked with them, and certainly not to people who live thousands of miles away as I do….

…so thank you.

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