Martin Coutts and I have been working on a new EdTech podcast called #coffeechat and it’s time for it to be launched on iTunes. We met last week, recorded the show, and collaborated via email and Dropbox to get the files ready for upload.
Over the next seven days I converted the .wav file to a reasonably sized .mp3, added ID3 tags and uploaded it to Internet Archive. The last step took a while and I had to resort to using the most basic of upload options (non flash!) to successfully complete the upload process.
The next stage was to make use of WordPress to create a podcast feed which contains the mp3 file stored in IA.
Once this was set up I made use of Feedburner to add iTunes-specific tags and cover art.
Finally I attempted to submit the podcast via the iTunes Store. Here I encountered a major stumbling block: iTunes couldn’t recognise the mp3 file in the XML!
I couldn’t work out why. Even a post to my Twitter #pln drew a blank!
Tonight I found a feed validator and it helped me resolve the issue. Turns out the mp3 URL has to be http not https; the domain archive.org needs to be entered as www.archive.org . It was a similar situation with the cover art URL. Half an hour working through the URL problem and iTunes accepted the podcast.
Now we just have to wait. But in the meantime you are more than welcome to subscribe via http://feeds.feedburner.com/coffeechatuk – comments are more than welcome!
