How to make a podcast

Posted 2 years, 8 months ago at 5:51 pm. 3 comments

Making a podcast is a lot simpler than I thought. Big thanks to Colin McKay for helping me out with this one.

A podcast is simply a small file called an ‘RSS feed’ that points to the audio (mp3) file that you want to podcast. This little ‘RSS feed’ file is then registered with a podcast site, like the apple itunes podcast site.

How it works
When someone clicks on the podcast icon in itunes, it takes them to the apple itunes podcast site, where they can search for the podcast they want. The apple site then points their itunes software to the little RSS file, which then points their itunes to the mp3 file that contains the audio. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a series of little signposts that eventually point to the mp3 file.

So as you can see, we need to put the mp3 file up, then create an RSS feed that points to the mp3 file, and then we register this RSS feed with itunes. We can then access the podcast from itunes.

So really the audio file alone is not the podcast, the rss file is not the podcast, the itunes store is not the podcast. The podcast is really the whole set of signposts.
The advantage of a podcast is that all the audio files are easy to find because they are centralised into the itunes store, and the process of downloading them once you are subscribed is automatic.

Let’s look at how to do it step by step.

Put up the mp3 file

The first set is to make an mp3 file (eg via ‘itunes’) and then place it on the internet somewhere using an ftp program (’cyberduck’ is a good ftp program). You will need an account on a webserver to do this. This is dealt with elsewhere on ‘How to put a file on the internet’). The file will be called something like ‘talk1.mp3′ and it will be at a location somethign like ‘http://mywebsite.com.au/talks/talk1.mp3′. For our example we used the real file called ‘20060212.mp3′ which we put on the web at at http://sermons.dpc.org.au/1john/20060212.mp3

Make an RSS file that points to the mp3 file

Now we need to make an RSS file that will point the the mp3 file to tell the podcast directory (in this case, the apple itunes podcast directory) where to find the mp3 file. There are hundreds of programs to make an RSS feed (eg ‘feedforall’) , but it’s hard finding a free one! Vodcaster looks good but it’s only for tiger. One good free one is at http://www.phelios.net/rss-writer.html it’s easy to use. The program will ask for information like the name of the mp3 file, artist, title of webcast etc, and it will put all this information into a file called an RSS file, which it will save to your hard drive. The program will give the file an extension of .xml So we called ours dpc and it was saved as ‘dpc.xml’

Put the RSS file somewhere on the web

It doesn’t matter where. We uploaded ours to http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml

Register the podcast with itunes

The last step is to let itunes know where the rss file is kept. Open up itunes, and click on the ‘podcasts’ icon. Down the bottom click on ‘podcasts directory’. This will take you to apple’s podcast page on the itunes music store. There is a link called ‘Submit a Podcast’ which you can click on. It will ask you for the podcast feed url. This is the address of the rss fiel you just created. (Eg http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml) Paste the address and click continue. Unfortunately you need to then enter your apple ID, you’ll need to register with apple to get one, it doesn’t cost anything, it’s not a .mac membership, just an apple id. Apple will send an email telling you when the podcast has been approved. It may take an hour or two.

Subscribe to the podcast

You should now be able to find your podcast on the ituens webpage. Go to itunes, podcasts, podcasts directory. There is a box to search for a podcast. Type in part of the name of your podcast (eg I might type in ‘Dubbo’) and click ’search all podcasts’. It will display all the matches, in our case, 1 match - ‘DPC BibleTalks’. Click on subscribe to subscribe ot the podcast. You are now subscribed to the podcast!

Link to the podcast

Now the final step is to link to your new podcast from a webpage. Open itunes podcasts and next to your subscibed podcast title is a little right arrow. Click on this and it wil take you to the itunes homepage for your podcast.

If you right click on the podcast entry down the bottom, there is an option called ‘Copy itunes Music Store URL’. Click this and then it will copy the URL to the clipboard. You can then paste this into your homepage or email it to your friends. Ours was http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=121967957&s=143460&i=2214949

If you click on this it will open itunes and take you to our newly created podcast!

3 Replies

Colin Feb 18th 2006

Thanks Wayne. The “rss-writer” program looks quite good.
When I used the program it dealt with the standard fields quite well.
One great clue it gave me is that line breaks can be placed in the description, so that perhaps an outline can be put into the Description so that it can come up in ITunes like it does in a web browser. I wonder? Perhaps I will try it and see.
I wrote the rss manually (witha bit of help from Dreamweaver), and there were a couple of traps that occurred writing it manually:
1. Encoding must be utf-8, or else various errors can occur. (I used a different encoding when I started, to my peril). “rss writer” uses the correct encoding.
2. The tags used in “rss writer” uses none of the ITunes codes that ITunes refer to on their reference websites (eg. http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/techspecs.html). If you try to put ITunes tags in the RSS feed will not validate. To get arround this change the initial “rss” tag to “rss xmlns:itunes=”http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd” version=”2.0″ to allow for ITunes tags, then ITunes tags can be used, allowing for a greater variety of information to be given for the use of ITunes specifically. The feed should still validate with the ITunes tags included.

Your Step 4 is really a convenience thing. If you look at the ABC podcasts, they do not refer people to ITunes, but have a link that people can copy into any equivalent program. (I tried Ipodder before I checked it with ITunes).
I tunes users would paste the address into Advanced –> Subscribe to podcasts.
wayne Jan 4th 2007

I checked out the ABC podcasts, they are not a good model, they have a few problems!

Here’s an example of a well done podcast:

http://theresurgence.com/podcast