Hi Shaun, On Saturday, September 22, 2007, at 06:37AM, "VaShaun Jones" wrote: > I tried subscribing to a podcast by using the advance > tab. It >asked for mthe URL so I went back too Safari and copied the URLL. I >put that in the field and went back to the songs folder under podcast >and I saw the links. Is this the correct procedure?
If you can play the podcasts this is the correct procedure! <smile>. The usual problem people have is identifying what to put in the URL Very often people put in the web page that tells them about the program and not the one that delivers the podcast episodes. Here are some example of what you might paste into the URL: (these are the same addresses that programs will tell you to give a podcatching program) BBC World Services podcast uses: feed://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/globalnews/rss.xml A lot of podcasts will come from podcast feed sites that have this kind of rss.xml extension National Public Radio (NPR) uses a different syntax. On the web page where Car Talk describes how to get their podcasts (http://www.cartalk.com/content/showpodcast/index.html) they point to a feed that looks like this: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=9911203 They also give an Apple iTunes Store podcast page: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=253191823 This kind of address is very slick, because it takes you to the specific podcast page at iTunes that lists all the individual episodes from a web address supplied to your browser! If you select this link or copy it to your Safari web browser, the address will redirect to iTunes, set iTunes to the iTunes Store and open up on a page that has the individual episodes! So, you can get individual episodes or try playing them first! Car Talk usually only has a couple of episodes on their feed at any time, but you can see what I mean. In the Songs Outline you can try sampling (press carriage return on the selected episode) and even play the whole thing without downloading. (This doesn't always work well if the feed is busy, especially if this is a video podcast. And some feeds don't seem to support this kind of online playing). And, of course, you can also download individual episodes by navigating to the "Price Column" and "clicking" (e.g. VO-keys +shift space bar). On the other hand, if I did a search of the iTunes Store by typing "NPR: Car Talk" in the Search Text Field, I'd get two entries. And if I selected the first one and pressed carriage return it would probably start sampling the podcast -- but only the latest episode. Only some web pages give links to their specific iTunes podcast page. You need to know the podcast ID Apple assigned to them. I don't think there's any accessible way of currently searching for these podcast pages. But maybe Darcy and Holly could put up a link to the iTunes Store podcast page for Screenless Switchers! <smile>. Hope this helps. (And to summarize, I gave 3 different ways of getting to a podcast subscription like NPR's Car Talk -- the RSS feed, which you can put into the URL in the Advanced Menu of iTunes; the Text Search String of "NPR: Car Talk" which you can use at the iTunes Store, and the web address with podcast id number at phobos.apple.com which is used to redirect these browser requests to the iTunes Store). Cheers, Esther
