How to make your episode notes work in all the podcast players
This article is at least a year old
What’s the best way to make your episode notes look brilliant on whatever app your listeners use?
It looks like our advice would be…
- In
<description>, use simple HTML with<p>around paragraphs <a hreflinks are now supported by Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts on Android.- Normal web addresses will be made clickable automatically.
- Steer clear of bold and italic - they don’t work everywhere.
- Keep the full length below 4,000 characters (including HTML tags).
If you do the above, your episode notes should display well on the most popular podcast apps out there: ones with greater than 2% market share.
Our tests
We checked with some test episodes in our popular time-based podcast, Podclock. Since we hand-code the RSS feed in this, we’re able to have full control over the feed.
Apple Podcasts
Apple Podcasts changed the way it displayed episode notes in iOS 14.5, which now pulls details from its crawler, not direct from your RSS feed.
Apple Podcasts iOS 14.6:
-
For HTML, it supports:
<p>paragraphs,<ul><li>bullets, and<a hreflinks. It doesn’t support bold/italic. It automatically makes raw URLs into links. -
This app has a limit of 4,000 characters.
We do observe that podcast shows in the Apple Podcasts directory behave differently than podcast shows subscribed-to via RSS. We’ve only tested shows in the directory.
- As seen in this screenshot of iOS 12.5, as long as you’re subscribed, the old Apple Podcasts app supports the same things as the newer app does.
Spotify (app)
-
Spotify appears to support the same HTML tags as Apple Podcasts -
<p>tags,<ul><li>bullets and<a hreflinks. It also makes raw URLs clickable. -
Spotify does support non-HTML line breaks, unlike Apple.
Google Podcasts (Android)
-
As in our screenshot, Google supports
<p>,<ul><li>bullet points,<a hreflinks, and makes raw links clickable. -
Episode notes have a limit of 5,000 characters.
Google Podcasts (iOS)
-
Rather disappointingly, this is an odd one out - it doesn’t deal with
<a hreflinks. Episode notes have a limit of 9,000 characters in Google Podcasts (iOS). -
That said, it’s unlikely that Google Podcasts has a large market share on iOS. In total it’s around 2%; we would suggest the vast majority of that is on Android.
Your favourite app
How does your favourite app work with all this? We’d love to know. You’ll find our fantastically popular PodClock podcast wherever you get your podcasts; we’ll keep a number of test episodes in there for episode note formatting.
