Esther and all,
There are lots of waays to get direct links to podcasts though. I
know it can be tedious, but having the direct link and droping it
into the field under podcasts in ITunes is realy easy.
This brings up a question. I'm confused about why there is a
separate area in ITunes for podcasts when you can also apparently get
them through the store?
On Mar 31, 2007, at 9:24 PM, Esther wrote:
Hi David,
hmm, the old way sounds simpler <grin> I got the feed. it was
blindcooltech.com with something.xml at the end of it. It seems to
work. Is there any way just to browse all the podcasts on the ITunes
store?
The problem is that you need to know either the address of the feed or
the iTunes address of the podcast page to find it under iTunes. If the
authors of podcasts posted a link to their iTunes podcast page on their
web sites you could browse and get individual podcast episodes without
having to subscribe and be taken to the right page in the podcast
section of the iTunes Store automatically without having to do anything
except click the link in your browser. You could just start interacting
with the Songs Outline and reading the description of individual
episodes. You could choose to download any episode by
arrowing across to the "Free" column and selecting with
VO-keys+shift+space. Then you'd only find the selected episodes
in your Podcast Library.
Only a very few number of podcast sites provide such a link, and
since there's no way for you to know the podcast ID number that was
assigned to the authors, you can't guess how to find this.
Here's an example from the free "This American Life" podcast
web pages. They give links to both their RSS feed, and
a link to their Podcast web page in iTunes which goes to:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?
id=201671138
If you click the link, or copy the address to your browser and return,
you'll get taken to their podcast page under iTunes. Darcy and
Holly could do this if they replace the id number with the id number
assigned to their Screenless Switchers podcast.
If you can get to this page, for example, if someone clicked the
currently inaccessible links in iTunes to navigate to the podcast
page, or if you did a LOT of experimenting with mousekeys moving
around and clicking at the end of results of your podcast search
you could find a "Copy URL" option in the contextual menu.
So the Podcast webcast page address in iTunes for Blind Cool Tech is
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?
id=78111172
If you want to try this, but you can't currently get this information
with any
ease in an accessible fashion. I'd guess this is coming in the next
revisions.
The web address podcast search using:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearch?mt=2
(everything should be on a single line in the browser) is another
hack, but
it lets you search for podcasts by keywords in the description, or by
author
or exact title. (Hint to Jane: put "Celtic Music" in the description
field *grin*).
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
