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..
- Options for Recording Stories on the iPad: Story Patch with Story Robe, Sonic Pics, & Story Kit - 2011
- Design Matters by Darren Kuropatwa at METC 2010 - 2010
- The Natives Are Restless by Deneen Frazier Bowen - 2010
- Storychasing Literacy Keynote on SlideShare (METC 2010) - 2010
- One of the best visual presentations I've ever seen - 2009
- 161 Museums in Oklahoma! - 2009
- How We Use Open Source Software and Why You Should Too - 2009
- Will Richardson's OTA09 Breakout - RSS: Connecting Ideas and Knowledge - 2009
- Opening Session: Oklahoma Technology Association Conference 2009 - 2009
- Hatred, Racism, the 9th Governor of Oklahoma, WikiPedia, and "approved textbook history" - 2008
