iTunes has stopped updating this podcast because you have not listened to any episodes recently ...
Has anyone found a workaround for this annoyance with iTunes for the PC? I listen to podcasts with rockbox, so podcasts are never updated in iTunes, and I have to manually tell iTunes to resume updating my many podcast subscriptions.
I've read this is in-built, but perhaps some clever readers of this post have come up with a way to fool iTunes (a script temporarily changing the system date, a hack to some iTunes control file or script, etc.).
Thx.
Related
I have recently published my first Mac app onto the Mac App Store, forgive me if this is a stupid question but i can find no place on iTunes Connect that shows the analytics for it, the App Analytics section on iTunes Connect only shows my iOS app? There must be somewhere to see how many units i have sold?
So i contacted apple an there reply was:
App Analytics is available only for iOS developers at this time, and it reports data only from customers using iOS 8 and above. Therefore you will not see data from your Mac app.
If you would like, I can submit feedback on your behalf for a possible future enhancement. If this is something you would like me to do, please reply with a clarification of your request, and I will be happy to send it up for you.
So the short answer is there is nowhere for you to find how many downloads/revenue you have earned. Which is well, shit
I want to make the podcast player on our website register plays with iTunes, to get a better ranking on iTunes. I figured this could be possible if iTunes provided an iTunes URL for every episode, but I cannot find one. I've tried looking at the search/lookup API, but it seems to me it doesn't output individual episodes.
Anyone know if this is possible? Registering/tracking plays to iTunes.
iTunes does not provide usage or download statistics. See their explanation from http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#tracking :
Please note that iTunes does not provide usage statistics, because we do not host feeds or episodes. Some podcasters have created
mechanisms for tracking the number of times that each episode has been
downloaded.
If the goal is to get better ranking, encourage your podcast listeners to subscribe, review, and rate for your podcast. Those things are more visible in the iTunes store and to potential new listeners & subscribers.
If you are using a CMS like WP there are plenty of plugins that will give you the analytical data that iTunes (stitcher et al) dosn't provide.
of course, all itunes does is provide a nifty UI for listeners to find your cast; it PLAYS off of your site. I wasn't satisfied with the "popularity bar" on my 'cast...cuz the what is it popular relative to? other casts in same category? all of them? ...
anyway I was already using "seriously simple podcasting" - a wp plugin to properly config my 1400x1400 jpg, my cast and all its meta-data so itunes could
crawl & play it.
make no mistake, this is not a plug; just the way I found that works easy; they have a tracking plugin as well - it tells me number of unique downloads and whether the users are using mobile or desktop to access (not much but way better than nothing) - number of downloads was mainly what I wanted to know.
As for improving your ranking; max-out quality and quantity, make it something people (not just in your specific peer group) would WANT to listen to. Same deal for blogs, be funny, be informative, be creative, be unique, be scandalous, above all BE INTERESTING or your newest listener won't rate, subscribe, or even comeback. QUALITY is the only legit SEO for pages, 'casts, etc.
Is it possible to write an AppleScript as a daemon to monitor or poll from iTunes the current playing song info such as artist name, song title, playback position, etc. ?
Ideally, I'd like to be able to get the info at the exact starting moment of the song.
If yes, where can I find the resources to learn how to do it?
Yes, it is possible to write a launch agent or daemon-like background app that uses AppleScript to get the currently playing iTunes song.
Looking at this closely related question, I see that whenever the state of iTunes changes, it sends out a systemwide notification event named "com.apple.itunes.playerinfo" that you can register your app to listen for.
So, I'm trying to implement a solution to a problem that I posted on superuser.
What I'm trying to do
I want to write a (Windows) application to synchronize podcast subscriptions in iTunes (and possibly iPhone/iPod touch apps, though I'll ignore them for now) between multiple computers that are using the same iTunes account.
How I'm planning on doing it
My initial thought was to do the following:
1) Grab the list of all podcast subscriptions from iTunes on computer A
2) Do some synching, giving new podcast urls to a program on computer B
3) Subscribe to the new podcasts in iTunes with computer B
I think I could do all this by parsing the ITL file, which is where subscription information seem to be stored. I haven't been able to find any documentation for this, though.
Maybe I'm going about this wrong and using the iTunes COM interface would be a decent way to grab the list of subscribed podcasts (step 1) and then subscribing to them (step 3). Is there a smarter way to go about doing this?
Summary
Before I reinvent the wheel, is there already a solution for synching podcast subscriptions among multiple computers?
What is the most appropriate method for grabbing a list of podcasts that iTunes is subscribed to?
What is the most appropriate method of subscribing iTunes to new podcasts?
As a note, I e-mailed Apple's Developer Support with pretty much the same questions, but apparently asking questions about documentation/API doesn't count as technical support.
Thanks,
On OS X there is no way to get iTunes' list of podcasts. You can ask for podcast tracks (and kind of arrange them by album name), but iTunes will not tell you anything about the actual podcasts themselves (URLs, status, name etc.).
I have zero experience of iTunes on Windows, but I'd be very surprised if the API were more comprehensive than the OS X one.
We want to write a Windows/OS X app that sends podcast ratings info from an iPod and iTunes back to a server. Two questions:
Is there documentation for how ratings data are stored in iTunes,
if a user has iTunes set to auto-delete programs he has heard, is there a way to capture the ratings data before it's gone?
I doubt there is an official spec on the data file format, but you can find rating info in the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file in the iTunes directory. Look for a key called "Rating" with an integer value from 0 to 100. It won't be there if the user hasn't rated the item. For example, a 4-star rating will have a value of 80.
itunes stores its Music Library data and Ratings in an XML file on the user's machine. In windows its located in the "Music" or "My Music" folder.
You can open the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file and look for the Rating element to see what the user rated each song. Since its XML, it's pretty self-explanatory. That should be pretty easy to open and parse from the program you're writing.
I think iTunes doesn't remove the podcasts from its xml file until the program is closed. You should be able to grab that rating data as long as itunes is still open.
In addition to the xml file, there is also a COM interface that will give you access to all of the library info, including the rating for each song. The SDK is documented.
I don't know what language you want to use, but I have used the C# to interface with iTunes and it was very smooth.
You can download the SDK at http://developer.apple.com/sdk/