Podcast episode titles

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Nocky
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Podcast episode titles

Post by Nocky » Sun Jul 17, 2022 7:15 pm

I know you've been there too: You're in the middle of a run, or doing housework, or on a road trip perhaps, when the episode of your favourite podcast—Kanzenshuu—finishes, and it's time to choose a new one. Alas! The episodes are merely titled "Episode #493" and so on in your podcast application of choice, and you must scan through the episode descriptions to find one you want to listen to next. If you're as picky as I am, that can take a long time. After all, what if I specifically want to hear one of Jake's in-universe deep-dives, or Robo-Julian discussing translation, or a specific video-game review from years past? Maybe I'm following the Manga Review of Awesomeness and want to quickly locate the next installment.

I notice that episodes of the podcast do sort of have titles to describe the topic, which is given on the front page when they are newly-released (eg. "Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero" Review). I don't think they've always had them, but they have going back the later DaizEX days at least. So I suppose my question is: Are these "titles" listed anywhere, or could they provided? Then my collection of my favourite podcast could be truly complete.

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VegettoEX
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Re: Podcast episode titles

Post by VegettoEX » Mon Jul 18, 2022 11:15 am

So all of the "titles" are actually embedded in the RSS feed as the episode "subtitle":

Image

I guess this part of the feed was used more often in the past than most readers/apps show today, because I certainly remember it being far more visible / forward-facing. For example, within the actual iTunes desktop application, that's what would be listed next to the episode number... and that makes sense, because it was specifically iTunes feed syntax, as you can see from the code example. (I don't use iTunes anymore for podcast management, so I have no idea if it still does this.)

I don't really have a great solution for you, but it might tie in with other requests I've had from folks: once I removed the first roughly half of episodes from the RSS feed (because it was breaking some apps with too many entries), folks keep saying they "don't know where/how to find" older podcast episodes... despite the fact that no file has ever been removed, and all episodes have entries on the website.

So I might just manually make a "complete listing of podcast episodes" single web page that is just raw data like episode number, sub-title, and link to the website post. It sounds like boring manual work, but nothing I couldn't knock out in an evening with a couple cups of coffee...
:: [| Mike "VegettoEX" LaBrie |] ::
:: [| Kanzenshuu - Co-Founder/Administrator, Podcast Host, News Manager (note: our "job" titles are arbitrary and meaningless) |] ::
:: [| Website: January 1998 |] :: [| Podcast: November 2005 |] :: [| Fusion: April 2012 |] :: [| Wiki: 20XX |] ::

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Nocky
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Re: Podcast episode titles

Post by Nocky » Wed Jul 20, 2022 5:58 pm

A-ha! Thanks Mike, I appreciate the explanation - and I can derive the list of "titles" I'm looking for by using the RSS file. :D

I tried a few popular apps just now and I noticed none of them are surfacing the itunes:subtitle tag (save for desktop iTunes, of course, which does use it as the "Description") so I think that many listeners don't get to see the subtitle at all. Looking around at a few other podcasts, it looks like the modern convention is to use the title tag for the episode's name. If it's possible, I think that moving the content from the itunes:subtitle tag to the title would really increase the accessibility of the Kanzenshuu podcast.

You can sign me up as someone who'd make use of a "list of episodes" page in the future!

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nineko
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Re: Podcast episode titles

Post by nineko » Fri Jul 22, 2022 6:02 am

VegettoEX wrote: Mon Jul 18, 2022 11:15 amSo I might just manually make a "complete listing of podcast episodes" single web page that is just raw data like episode number, sub-title, and link to the website post. It sounds like boring manual work, but nothing I couldn't knock out in an evening with a couple cups of coffee...
It doesn't have to be manual work: as a programmer I can write something that parses the RSS data procedurally if you want. You said that the first half of the data has been removed, but I'm sure you kept backups somewhere.

Being a newcomer I'd like to help if I can, so my adventure here can start in the best way.

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