Podpress problem

What did you mean with “does not display anything”?
Is the player not visible in the sidebar? Or is the playlist empty and it does not play any music?

If the player is visible and it plays no music then there are at least two possibilities:
– If you are using a podPress version older than 8.8.4 then it might be a problem which is fixed in v8.8.4. (Is it possible to load the XSPF playlist? Try to load the list manually. The URL is like this http://www.example.com/?feed=playlist.xspf. Are there any URLs to media files in it?)
– The XSPF player widget can only play .mp3 files.

The player in the posts or pages and the sidebar are different programs. The player in the sidebar works in v8.8. But the player in the sidebar should play the songs from the XSPF feed which is not a RSS feed. It is a play list feed.
In v8.8 the method how the player gets the playlist URL is often not working. In v8.8.4 this method is reworked.

If it is v8.8.4 then there is eventually something wrong with the XSPF feed. Try to load the playlist. The should be like http://www.example.com/?feed=playlist.xspf. If enter the XSPF feed URL in your web browser then the browser should download the playlist file which has the name playlist.xspf. It should be possible to open it with a simple text editor.
The structure of the data in this file should be like in this Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format) described.

If you can’t download such a file then the feed is maybe rerouted somehow (maybe by a statistic or feed plugin or an .htaccess entry).

The playlist is automatically assembled by podPress. You don’t have to edit a file.

You can download or subscribe to this playlist with the URL of the XSPF feed which looks like: http://www.example.com/?feed=playlist.xspf

If you have an own playlist which you create manually, you could upload it with media uploader of WordPress or with any FTP program. At the moment there is no possibility to tell the XSPF player of podPress to use an playlist other than the automatic playlist.

@pgcr: podPress uses now a different XSPF player: http://blog.lacymorrow.com/projects/xspf-jukebox/
The Wiki you have linked above is one for a different player.

The default value of “URL of media files directory” is the URL of the default upload path of WP. Chang it only if your podcast episodes store somewhere else.
If you insert something as “Local path to media files directory” then you will get a list of all media files which are in this folder in the box below the post editor.
But the XSPF feed resp. playlist will be build from the meta information which podPress adds to the posts with podcast episodes.
That is an automatic process which will be started when you or the player making a request with an URL like this http://www.example.com/?feed=playlist.xspf . The playlist will contain all mp3 files which you have added with podPress.

If you adjust this link with your blog URL and insert it in the address line of your browser then should get a file with the name playlist.xspf. Please, tell me if you get such a file.

It could be helpful if I could take a look at your web site.

The mp3 files are not added with podPress

That is the problem resp. also the cause for error message

file cannot be found

. If there no post with media files which were attached with podPress then podPress is not able to create such a playlist – and the player cannot find the playlist.
You have to add the media files with podPress to posts (or pages). It is not possible to give the player a list of files or an existing playlist or simply a location of the files.

You don’t need to add these mp3 files to the media library of your blog (although the plugin Add From Server could help you with this). But add them with podPress to posts (or pages).

podPress generates the XSPF playlist only on demand. There is no file laying around. It is equivalent to way WP or podPress produce RSS and ATOM feeds. That is why some of the necessary functions are in the podpress_feed_functions.php. But if you have an program which produce the .xspf file for you (or if you do it by hand) then an easier way to change the way to change the URL the XSPF player uses is to hack the podpress_xspfplaylist.php file.

But if you only want to add mp3 to a player with a playlist and not podcast in the common way (creating a post with a describing text or not and adding one or more audio or video files to it which become enclosure in the entries resp. items of a feed) then maybe another (XSPF) plugin could help you more.

I have one more hint: If you add a media file with podPress then you can insert an URL of a remote file into the field “Location” (below the editor). In other words, it is also possible to upload the media files to a different server.