Ramblings of a Programmer

Apple has released their official specifications on what you need to do in order to publish your podcast in the iTunes Music Store. Dave Winer has more on his Really Simple Syndication site.

It appears that Apple's release of podcasts via the iTunes store has been more of a hit than people would have expected. I have not seen any numbers on the situation, but I have started to see some of my favorite podcasts like Apple News Log having to look for more bandwidth in otther places due to the unexpected increase in bandwidth usage.

The question now is whether or not Apple's release of podcasts via the iTunes store is going to have such a negative affect on some of the smaller podcasters that we will see some of the good podcasts disappear? I hope that is not the case.

To prevent such a matter, however, maybe people should start donating to some of their favorite podcasts to help with the bandwidth costs. If not, then we might start seeing the very thing on podcasts that we were trying to get away from on the radio… commercials!

Updated: Changed the article link that is pointed to on the Apple News Log.

I picked up iTunes 4.9 yesterday and started playing with it. The podcast support is pretty good at this point. The directory is coming online in the iTunes Store podcast area pretty nicely. Unfortunately, there are some issues that have disappointed me.

First, if you were subscribed to podcasts that are using BitTorrent feeds to save on bandwidth, you will have to keep a client like iPodderX or Azureus around to continue to pick up those feeds. From the Apple iTunes/Podcast FAQ:

What kind of podcasts can I play in iTunes?
You can listen to most common podcast file formats in iTunes, including MP3, AAC, WAV, and .M4B. BitTorrent and WMA are some podcast formats that are not supported.

This is very unfortunate. I was trying to use BitTorrent whenever I could to help podcasters on bandwidth. I guess it was a good thing that I recently registered iPodderX anyway.

The second issue that has me puzzled is why Apple did not include an “All” option in the new Podcasts section on the iPod. The way that it is setup now is that you go into Music->Podcasts and then select the podcast playlist that you want to listen to. When all of the podcasts in that playlist are finished, it returns back to the main menu. I would like to have the option to just play all of the podcasts so I can start it when I head out on a long road trip instead of having to fumble with the iPod to change playlists while driving.

Hopefully enough people will give feedback to Apple about these issues and they will put out an update with some tweaks.