No duration in RSS feeds + iTunes isn’t showing duration

Hello @faiza0khan,

Edit the post in question, scroll down to the episode box and click the checkbox to modify it. Then click the ‘Verify’ button. When it completes it should populate both the file size and duration fields. If it does not populate the duration then you will have to select the manual option as you mentioned and enter the duration manually. Once you enter this information, click “Update” to save the blog post information. If you do not click update, the changes you made will not be saved. Don’t forget to clear caches if you use any plugins or services that cache pages on your site.

Hi Angelo!

Thank you for your response.

I have been doing the exact same steps as you’ve mentioned in your reply, but neither do I see the Duration coming up in the RSS feeds, nor iTunes populating the Time of my MP3 files when I upload my RSS feed link.

I put my MP3 file link in the Podcast Episode box and selected ‘Specify’ & enter the duration of my MP3 file, after which I clicked the Verify button, the file gets successfully verified. But when I click on Update the radio button goes back to ‘Auto detect’ option (but the values entered for duration and size still retain). However the RSS feeds don’t show the <duration> tag, not do iTunes pick the duration when I verify my RSS Feed. I have cleared my browser cache, plugin cache and refreshed my RSS feeds too, but no luck so far.

Also the ‘auto detect’ size/duration works perfectly as it automatically detects the values correctly but I see only Size value (i.e. ‘lenght’ tag in the RSS Feed) coming up on the feed, not the Duration in the RSS feed.

Please let me know if there is anywhere where we can populate the Duration in the RSS feeds and thereby its picked by iTunes and other directories.

Thanks,
Faiza

Hi Angelo,

Tweaked the powerpress.php page a little after which the duration field is getting populated. Seems like the condition

preg_match(‘/^(\d{1,2}:){0,2}\d{1,2}$/i’, ltrim($EpisodeData[‘duration’], ‘0:’) )

was creating some problem in this case. Have updated it and its working fine now.
This check seems absolutely fine but not sure why it wasn’t working in this case.

Thanks for your help its highly appreciated!

Hello Faiza,

What did you update in the source that fixed the issue? I can apply it to the main plugin that way this problem does not come back in future releases.

Thanks,
Angelo

Have a friend who uses Power Press. I parse the RSS for a MySql database. A while back the itunes:duration dropped out of the feed. Recently I wrote a script to test the Mp3Info class with a download limit that was higher than the default. In the past he exported at a bit rate of 96 then changed to 112.

I found that if I changed the download limit to 6MB the bitrate and duration would show up. The avdataoffset is pretty far into the file. Around 600,000. So the information is in the file it just requires downloading more of it. Does anyone know if an ID3 tag editor would cause the data to be stored outside the first 1024k of the file?

I’ve tested exporting from Audacity without modifying ID3 tags and the highest offset I found was around 5900.

Thanks,
Kevin

I thought I’d let you know what I found. My friend uses an ID3 editor to add a variety of metadata to the file before submitting to iTunes. I took the latest episode and tested the location of the data offset. WITH the embedded artwork it is 1982592. If I remove the artwork from the metadata it starts at 3366.

I also created a short Mp3, about 1:30 in length, using Audacity. I exported it with no metadata. The avdataoffset was 0. When I added Artist, Title, Year, Genre the offset was 256.

Don’t know if that will help someone else or not.

Hello Kevin,

That is very helpful information!

The biggest in influence on the ID3 size is the cover artwork. You can technically add multiple images but it is common to only add one image which is limited in size to about 100-300KB.

Here is the 411 on the ID3 tags and iTunes. The TV and iOS podcast apps do not use the artwork found in the ID3 tags. The Desktop app does display the artwork. Because the TV app does not use the artwork, it is not necessary for the ID3 artwork to use the 1400×1400 or larger size. The iTunes desktop app has no issues displaying the ID3 artwork that is the typical 300×300 size. The most common ID3 image size the music industry uses is 300×300 in jpg format, which typically results in an image around 100-200KB of size. The largest ID3 image I have seen from record labels was 500×500 in png format which had a file size of 300KB.

I prefer to use WinAmp on a PC to check the ID3 tags of a media file as it gives me just a few more details that iTunes desktop does not include such as the location where the header starts at (this is the byte where the audio starts after the ID3 tags), as well as media information such CBR or VBR.

Thank you for that information. I was thinking the images were the culprit. I will pass this along.