I was recently asked to help out by setting up a podcast and have it integrated in a website. Pretty straight forward you would say… so here is the environment I started out with:
- A standard WordPress website with a default, clean theme installed;
- Some audio files in MP3 format;
- A burberry account;
- Blurberry their podcast plugin;
- Some other plugins such as Yoast, Wishlist, etc.
Pretty straight forward stuff.
All was connected, iTunes could read the RSS feed, the MP3 podcast where playing. Time to submit the stuff to Apple.
After a few days the podcast seem to be accepted until I got a standard email from Apple that the podcast was rejected because the podcast could not be downloaded.
Tested each and every MP3 file, downloaded and played in iTunes, so I’ve submitted again, except having just one published podcast to make things more simple for Apple and their iTunes droids.
Beep-boop, podcast rejected because the podcast was already submitted… guess what?! There is no way to remove your old podcast feed, you can just work with some tags in the feed to point out to some new RSS location.
Contacting Apple support… the noob at the support desk deleted the podcast feed from their server so I could submit again.
… rejected … could not download the podcast files.
Tested with feed validator, feed was valid. Tested with iTunes, feed was valid and podcast played fine.
Thought the problem was maybe blueberry it’s plugin so I setup the podcast with another WordPress plugin, put the feed trough FeedBurner from Google to get subscribers statistics. Tested the FeedBurner feed and it played all fine.
Submit feed the feedburner feed into Apple iTunes again… got accepted UNTIL: podcast could not download.
Back to Blurberry… contacted Blurberry support… they validated that the feed was okay also, all worked fine… but then the support engineer came with the brilliant question: what plugins do you have installed.
Nothing special, commonly used and well tested plugins:
- Yoast for SEO
- Blurberry for the Podcast
- Wishlist for the membership site
One of these plugins was the source of all problems: Wishlist!! The Wishlist membership plugin was messing up the downloads for Apple for some reason. I did not looked into into why and how but after I disabled the Wishlist plugin, resubmitted the feed all was good, the feed was accepted, it played fine… green fields and sunshine…
UNTIL…
An email came from Apple Support… As requested we’ve deleted your podcast.
The support guy read an old email and was acting upon this…
So last but not least step, I’ve tested all MP3 audio files with Audacity and discovered that two audio files where not playing well. Re-encoded the audio files, published all podcast and submitted again to Apple.