creating podcasts

[mrjohnchimpo]

oy gurus!

anybody have a tutorial that works on creating podcasts off an already recorded mp3? I've tried a couple things and can't get it to work...mostly cause i'm really just a hack :headbang:

[paul]

I've never really done it myself, but I know it's pretty simple. A podcast just has two parts, the MP3 file (or files if it's a repeating thing like a radio show) and an XML file, in RSS format, which serves as an index and table of contents for your MP3s.

Sounds like you already have your MP3 file encoded. So, you just need to make an RSS format XML file, and upload them both to your website.

I found this tutorial, which looked pretty good, especially if this is your first time hand-coding XML or web stuff...
http://radio.about.com/od/podcastin1/a/aa030805a_3.htm

Been listening to podcasts for a little while now. Post if you need help debugging yours.

[mrjohnchimpo]

yeah i tried this already and it doesn't work. couple questions about the RSS file:

1) does it need to be .rss or .xml ?

and

2) the date format in this tutorial throws me for a loop. there's 2 dates

<lastBuildDate>Today’s Date*</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:56:00 GMT</pubDate>*

And there's a note that says to put it into this format:

Make sure you express the date in the format of: Day: Date:Month:Year: hh:mm:ss . Also, you have to tell what timezone you are in, relative to GMT

so do I do:

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:56:00 GMT

OR

Wed:23:Aug:2006 00:56:00 GMT

(i removed the asterisks)

[mrjohnchimpo]

fyi here's my rss file:

http://www.schizocentral.com/sounds/encounter_04222007.rss

the mp3 http://www.schizocentral.com/sounds/04-22-07.mp3 is in the same directory. (it's a sermon from my church so don't listen if you'll burst into flames - that's what i'm testing for, they want to start a podcast for the congregation).

when i run the rss validation:

http://rss.scripting.com/ (I get a server timeout error)
http://validator.w3.org/ (says document can't be checked for some reason).

However if I just open the RSS in a browser it shows that I can subscribe to the RSS but then nothing happens.

thanks for the help!

[paul]

Well, I tried the RSS file. It loaded just fine for me, and showed up with one item in your podcast. I think it's ok, except you should format all of your dates like this...

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 12:00:00 CDT

... you would be correct to put this where is says "Todays Date*", I think.

I'm using Amarok, in Linux. I tried playing your MP3 with mpg123, and Amarok. Both choked on it with a weird message about "unsupported encoding" or "bad data". I get this both when I play it as a stream or a downloaded file from my desktop. I do have one program, mplayer, that does play it. Weird.

What program did you encode the MP3 with? Maybe there's some setting you used that's incompatible with a lot of players?

Something seems a little weird about your server too. It is returning the mime type text/plain for the file. It should probably text/xml . You can see this if you load the URL in Firefox, right click the page, View Page Info, then look at the value next to 'type'. Renaming the file from .rss to .xml might fix this.

Anyway, podcast software can be pretty finicky. I'd try resolving those issues, then test it again.

[paul]

However if I just open the RSS in a browser it shows that I can subscribe to the RSS but then nothing happens.

And, in response to this... In firefox, you can get it to act like a feed by creating a "Live Bookmark", and supplying this URL. In most podcast capable music software, you just cut and paste that URL into the source URL of the podcast.

Usually browsers don't quite do what you want when you just directly load the URL.

[paul]

Actually, scratch that last comment. I can't get your thing to load in firefox. Not sure why, it doesn't really say.

But, it did load fine as a podcast, in Amarok, other than that MP3 file encoding problem.

[mrjohnchimpo]

i've tried playing the mp3 on a bunch of windows software with no issues. not sure what was used to create it, but i'll ask.

ill try the other stuff as well and keep you posted.

thanks!

[mrjohnchimpo]

FYI...got it to work in iTunes and Firefox Live Bookmarks.

i was missing:

<link>http://www.schizocentral.com/sounds/04-22-07.mp3</link>

<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.schizocentral.com/sounds/04-22-07.mp3</guid>
in the items section of my xml file. nothing else changed.

thanks for your help, paul!

[mrjohnchimpo]

...hmmmm...the text/plain issue. i changed my extension to .xml and got this for the 2nd rss validation link. not sure what to do about it but the podcast subscription still works now.



Missing "charset" attribute for "text/xml" document. The HTTP Content-Type header (text/xml) sent by your web server (Apache/1.3.33 (Unix)) did not contain a "charset" parameter, but the Content-Type was one of the XML text/* sub-types.
The relevant specification (RFC 3023 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3023.txt)) specifies a strong default of "us-ascii" for such documents so we will use this value regardless of any encoding you may have indicated elsewhere.
If you would like to use a different encoding, you should arrange to have your server send this new encoding information.
No DOCTYPE found! Attempting validation with XHTML 1.0 Transitional. The DOCTYPE Declaration was not recognized or is missing. This probably means that the Formal Public Identifier contains a spelling error, or that the Declaration is not using correct syntax. Validation has been performed using a default "fallback" Document Type Definition that closely resembles "XHTML 1.0 Transitional", but the document will not be Valid until you have corrected this problem with the DOCTYPE Declaration.
Learn how to add a doctype to your document (http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-doctype) from our FAQ.
Note: The Validator XML support has some limitations (http://openjade.sourceforge.net/doc/xml.htm).
This page is not Valid XML!

Below are the results of checking this document for XML well-formedness (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-conformance) and validity.
Error Line 3 column 6: no document type declaration; will parse without validation. <rss version="2.0">

[paul]

I think that validator is for XHTML, which is also an XML format, but also has additional validity requirements. It will choke even on a valid RSS file.

I wouldn't worry about that too much. If you got it to work, awesome!