Show notes in Apple Podcast App not formatted like Blog Post

maxlwie
(@maxlwie)

5 years, 10 months ago

Hello,

I use the PowerPress Plugin to get my podcast episodes on the apple podcast app. I want the show notes in the podcast app to look like the text in my blog post (same format) However, the shown notes in the apple podcast app are never formatted like my blog post. The app takes all the text and links from the blog post and creates one big paragraph. Instead of paragraph breaks the app separates the text that is formatted as paragraphs in the blog post and adds in large spaces.

So far I have been including sources in my blog post as the actual URL link. The apple podcast app throws all these links into the same big paragraph. They can still be clicked, but it doesn’t look appealing.

I wonder if this is a common problem. Is there any setting I could change in the PowerPress PlugIn?

Thanks

Max

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

Plugin Support Shawn
(@shawnogordo)

5 years, 10 months ago

Please post a link to your show’s listing in Apple Podcasts so we can take a closer look at what’s going on.

Thread Starter maxlwie
(@maxlwie)

5 years, 10 months ago

Hello Shawn,

here is a link to my podcast. It is called The Year of Plenty.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-year-of-plenty-podcast/id1330614234?mt=2&i=1000412313434

When I play the episode and scroll down to look at the show notes they are all thrown into one big paragraph on the app.

Thanks for the help.

Max

Plugin Support Shawn
(@shawnogordo)

5 years, 10 months ago

I just subscribed to your show using the latest version of the Podcasts app on my iPhone 6 Plus and I’m seeing paragraph breaks in the notes for your most recent episode. Are you looking at it in the same app or a different app?

Thread Starter maxlwie
(@maxlwie)

5 years, 10 months ago

I am using the apple podcast app on my IPhone 7. When I go into the individual episodes I see the line breaks, but when I have an episode playing in the “pop-up window” (for lack of a better term) and scroll down the episode notes are all packed into one big paragraph. Line breaks are shown as exaggerated spaced between sentences, but not paragraph breaks. Links are all packed into one paragraph as well.

I hope my description makes sense.

Thanks for the help. Really appreciate it. It is tough to find good information on this.

Max

Plugin Support Shawn
(@shawnogordo)

5 years, 10 months ago

There’s really nothing you can do to change this display behavior. The Podcasts app uses the description from your main blog post. It looks like Apple hasn’t really designed its app to properly parse the formatting from these posts, unfortunately.

Plugin Author Angelo Mandato
(@amandato)

5 years, 10 months ago

You can try customizing your iTunes summary on a per episode basis to see if it overrides the description, but from our testing as Shawn said they are using the content:encoded and simply not formatting everything uniformly. Go to PowerPress settings > Episodes tab, check the box for iTunes summary, then click save. Now when you edit your podcast episodes, you can customize the iTunes summary. If you do not override the Summary, the content you enter will be formatted the best it can be for viewing, but keep in mind iTunes will take it all and put it together as one long paragraph, as you see in the app.

Thanks,
Angelo
Thread Starter maxlwie
(@maxlwie)

5 years, 10 months ago
Is there a way to format it in a special way in my blog post?

@amandato I will try to edit the iTunes summary like that. Maybe it helps.

Thanks for the help guys 🙂
- This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by maxlwie.
Plugin Support Shawn
(@shawnogordo)

5 years, 10 months ago

There’s nothing I’m aware of you can do with the formatting of the blog post that’ll impact how things display within podcasting apps.

Plugin Author Angelo Mandato
(@amandato)

5 years, 9 months ago

HEllo @maxlwie,

Part of the problem is we are in the middle of a transition from the desktop iTunes app to the iOS podcast app. For the desktop app, you can enter links as well as ordered and unordered lists via HTML tags in the itunes:summary. Apple’s latest podcast documentation, they no longer want HTML in the itunes:summary, but are now using the content:encoded and are now displaying more iTunes tags.

Last fall Apple had a page that described which field went where in which app, but in recent months they deleted that page.

As I know it today, the iOS podcast app mainly uses the content:encoded field in your feed. Other apps use the itunes:summary. All apps I believe will fall back to the feed’s <description> if no content:encoded or iTunes summary is found. Unfortunately WordPress does not put HTML in the <description> tag, so you need to make sure your podcasting plugin (PowerPress does this) adds the HTML tags to itunes:summary to be sure it will be included in other apps, while you also have the “Full text” option so the content:encoded is populated in all feeds for Apple Podcasts app.

Thanks,
Angelo