m4a enhanced podcast problem solved

10th February 2006

posted in apple, podcasting |

Learning new technology techniques can be a real pain and result in a lot of wasted time! But it also can result in figuring something new out, and gaining more expertise as well as troubleshooting skills, so those are good outcomes. After floundering around for quite a while this evening, I finally resolved an issue with my enhanced podcast not downloading into iTunes. The problem was not with my file, it was with the server.

I had directly uploaded the enhanced podcast (which is in m4a format, a version of Apple’s proprietary AAC format) to the Internet Archive for free hosting, since downloads from their site do not count against my monthly bandwidth allotment from POWWEB. Unfortunately, even though I specified the file was a M4A file, for some reason the server did not handle it correctly when it was requested by a browser or iTunes. It would download in a browser as an enormous string of text, and wouldn’t download in iTunes at all.

The alternative was to upload the file directly to my POWWEB account, which I did, but it still wouldn’t work as it should. Another possiblity was adding a .htaccess text file to the directory containing the m4a file, and but that didn’t do the trick either.

My last thought was going ahead and publishing the enhanced podcast with iWeb to my .Mac account, and then figuring out by looking at the HTML code what the direct link is to the m4a file. Couldn’t figure out the filename that way. I finally thought to mount my .Mac iDisk to the desktop and browse the directories to find the correct path and therefore direct URL. This would have been a lot more straightforward if you could just right/control click on the embedded enhanced podcast and selected “copy link” like you can for an image on a webpage, but of course you can’t do that.

At least this ridiculously complicated story has a happy ending: Now subscribers to my podcast can download the enhanced version of Wednesday’s presentation within iTunes, or anyone can view it online on my iWeb website.

I think my “takeaway” lesson-learned is that I won’t be making any more enhanced podcasts for awhile. They are pretty easy to make with Garageband3 and to publish online with iWeb, but I want/need to publish my podcast content to the Internet archive for bandwidth reasons and apparently that won’t work. I also want to publish my podcasts within my main Feedburner feed, not a separate RSS feed, and this does not appear easy to do at this point. As long as too many people don’t download the file my .Mac monthly bandwidth should be adequate. I exported as a mono-podcast at 32 Kbps and cut the file size in half from what it would be with a standard 64 Kbps podcast, but it is still a bit over 10 MB in size.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 12:11 am and is filed under apple, podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On February 11th, 2006, Bruce Deger said:

Hi Wesley,

Did you try converting the m4a files to mp4? QT Pro will do the job and the mp4 files tend to receive a warmer reception on the Internet, especially from those rogue Windows users.

2 On February 11th, 2006, Wesley Fryer said:

I have not tried that Bruce, thanks for the tip. In general I think it is best for people to stick to mp3 formats for podcasts, and if they are doing enhanced or video podcasts setup separate feeds for those. I am glad to have experimented with enhanced podcasts in the last few weeks, but I think I will stick to good ‘ole mp3 format for the most part, primarily because of accessibility issues but also because I think many folks do other things (multi-task) when they listen to podcasts, reducing the utility of releasing an enhanced version.

3 On February 13th, 2006, Bruce Deger said:

Thanks for all the blog postings and podcasting that you do. As a school technology integration person, I find them very helpful. Our school is not in a 1-1 situation at this time, but we are leveraging our 2-1 “laptops on carts” and are ready for 1-1 when finances allow. I have a few vidcasts of some of our applications in the classroom: http://tinyurl.com/cm83a and will add more in the coming weeks.

4 On February 13th, 2006, Wesley Fryer said: