iTunes Issues Resolved (*fingers crossed)

For the past several months we have been dealing with issues with our page on the iTunes store. It started when we had to switch from Feedburner to another service. First, the new service would not display all our episodes. They would truncate the oldest ones. I worked with their customer support for weeks to resolve the issue. In the meantime, odd things were happening with the iTunes page where listeners said they had issues getting episodes, only a handful would show up, etc. Then the worst thing possible happened, the link between our iTunes page and the feed was broken.

The iTunes store was now looking at our raw feed which does not incorporate all the necessary tags for showing information like our logo and episodes descriptions. The iTunes subscription still works in that subscribers will get the latest episodes, but only see the titles. The worst result was that our podcast no longer showed up in the iTunes search. For us, this was unacceptable.

I constantly bombarded both Apple and our provider with support tickets in order to fix the link. For them it would be a simple fix, replace the URL iTunes is looking at with another URL. Apple never responded to my requests. For the web savvy people, there is a method to include tags in a feed to force iTunes to use a new URL, but I had no means to interject those tags on the raw feed. Again, no help from support on that side of the equation.

Therefore, we had to register for a new iTunes store. We know this may be a pain for our current subscribers and we don’t want to make it hassle to listen to our show. But we were left with no other option. We are thankful for the few listeners we have and an action like this may cause people to move on because “it shouldn’t be this hard to listen to a podcast”. Be we feel and we hope that issues are now addressed. So here’s where we stand.

As a result we have several options for staying up to date with our content.
Here is the new link to iTunes:
New iTunes link
This link now shows all our episodes, logos, descriptions, etc. I have verified this works in iTunes on Windows and on iOS devices.

We also have our typical RSS feed which can be used in podcast applications. Again I have tried and tested this on applications like gPodder:
RSS Feed

If you want just the audio files and no other articles. Here is a feed that provides only audio postings along with short episode descriptions:
RSS Feed – Audio Only

And finally, if you are subscribed to our old link for iTunes, it should still work. The only thing you’ll be missing is our logo and episode descriptions.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. We are still a very young show trying to get up the learning curve.

 If you have any issues at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us. You can respond to this post, contact us via Twitter or email us directly at admin@admin.rolldicetakenames.com