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iTunes is not recognizing the enclosures in our RSS feed as podcast episodes. We're using Feedburner to add iTunes-specific tags to the feed, but iTunes has the problem with the original feed as well.

Here's our original RSS feed:

http://www.esvbible.org/devotions/rss/chronological/

Here's our Feedburnerized feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ESV-Chronological

Here's the podcast page on Apple's site:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/esv-chronological/id301024126

The enclosures are still there, with the appropriate type. Feedburner has changed the length of the enclosure from the empty string to "0", which after checking the spec is technically correct. What am I missing?

David Eyk
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1 Answers1

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Turns out, iTunes completely ignores the MIME type, and is dependent upon the .mp3 file extension in the URL. Adding the extension fixes the feed.

David Eyk
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  • Absolutely stunning – after fighting for months (!) over different fields and formats for [our RSS feed](https://decentralize.fm/feed), this was the one solution. Absolutely amazing. Fortunately, we had control over the source platform. We were previously hosting our "enclosure" URIs via simply a hash with all the appropriate headers, but it seems iTunes is stuck in the dark ages with its reliance on "file extensions". Thanks for the esoteric tip, we figured it out as a result! – Eric Martindale May 06 '15 at 05:07
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    It hurts a little, doesn't it? – David Eyk May 06 '15 at 13:14
  • I can't believe I wasted so much time trying to figure this out. Three emails to Apple Support, countless hours reviewing each and every single attribute in our feed... – Eric Martindale May 08 '15 at 05:32
  • Unbelievable. Thanks for this. I wonder what other extensions it expects suffixed to the url? `.m4a` maybe? – Chris Sep 21 '16 at 21:24