An end to AppleCoreMedia useragents?

• Last month, we wrote a piece about AppleCoreMedia, a user agent that most podcast hosts don’t correctly attribute, either falsely increasing or decreasing Apple’s share. In a good example of collaboration across podcasting, Omny Studio and Spreaker have worked together to produce this code and testing tool which fixes that for app developers, once and for all. It’s open source and available for anyone.

• The BBC Podcast Festival has just started, run by the BBC Academy, the corporation’s training arm. There are sessions throughout May, and it’s free to anyone in the world as part of their Production Unlocked series. Sign up here; our Editor is speaking on the final session on May 27.

  
  Sep 3 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• How long can your episode notes be? Preliminary tests seem to show that PocketCasts, Overcast and Spotify deal with at least 10,000 characters; Google Podcasts (Android) truncates after about 5,000 characters; and we gather that Apple Podcasts currently truncates after about 4,000 characters.

• In a tweet, Dan Misener suggests there is change on the way with the Apple Podcasts iOS 14.6 app, currently in beta. That will support proper links, and will support content:encoded, according to the current beta anyway.

• Our soon-to-be award-winning PodClock show on Apple Podcasts seems to load random numbers of episodes every time it’s crawled by Apple. We don’t understand why; it’s a static file. Feel free to take a peek and let us know where we’re going wrong.

This is a cut-down version of Podnews today. Have your vaccination; but plan for some time to recuperate after.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Day 24

• Want to embed your podcast into your website? We’ve added Fusebox to our page of embedded players, alongside players from Apple, Spotify and others.

Podcast News - with Sounder․fm

On Sounder: Understanding Today’s Narcissist - What are the 10 steps to grooming someone into believing that they are losing it? What is gaslighting?

In The New Media Show, Todd Cochrane suggests that the way Apple Podcasts has dealt with episode notes may have changed from the beta test. And they have jingles now.

In Podland, economist Will Page discusses the economic future for podcasting after Apple and Spotify’s recent announcements; and Sam Sethi talks to Descript.