Feature Request: View show notes

[JonTheNiceGuy]

It would be useful to view show notes. For example, cchits.net (my own site) has relevant information for the podcast in the RSS feeds (http://cchits.net/daily/rss)

[pforhan]

I agree, it would be really cool to download a local copy of the notes for quick reference.

[bherrmann7]

Is it the standard that show notes are in the RSS, or in the MP3? Would you want to look at the notes from the podcast list.... I would think looking at it from the main player could be danergous (when driving...)

[JonTheNiceGuy]

The notes are in the RSS feed.

In this item enclosure (from http://cchits.net/daily/rss), see the tag

<item>
    <title>The CCHits.net Daily Exposure Show for 2012-04-22</title>
    <link>http://cchits.net/daily/20120422</link>
    <guid>http://cchits.net/daily/20120422</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[<h1>The CCHits.net Daily Exposure Show for 2012-04-22</h1>
    <form action="http://cchits.net/vote/576/792?go" method="post">
        <p><img src="http://cchits.net/media/track/576.png" alt="QR Code for this page" /> "<a href="http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/896970">Reality Bites</a>" by "<a href="http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Emerald_Park">Emerald Park</a>" <input type="submit" name="go" value="I like this track!" /></p>
    </form>
    <p>Don't see the vote button above? <a href="http://cchits.net/vote/576/792">Click here</a> to vote.</p>

]]>

    <category>Music</category>
    <pubDate>Sat, 21 Apr 2012 22:50:15 -0700</pubDate>
    <author>show@cchits.net (CCHits.net Show Admin)</author>
    itunes:authorshow@cchits.net (CCHits.net Show Admin)/itunes:author
    itunes:explicitno/itunes:explicit
    itunes:subtitleThe CCHits.net Daily Exposure Show for 2012-04-22/itunes:subtitle
    itunes:keywordsFree daily Creative Commons Licensed Music/itunes:keywords
    itunes:duration00:03:00/itunes:duration
</item>

Notice it's enclosed using a CDATA tag, like this: <![CDATA[html goes in here]]>

This means that anything between the <![CDATA[ and the ]]> is not treated as regular XML.

I agree that it could be dangerous when driving, but not everyone uses the podcast catcher when driving. Personally, I use it during the day at my desk.

I could see it being useful as a long-press action from the podcast list, or as a button (like the voice notes button) on the player page.

[pforhan]

I think we'd be best off following the tag rather than trying to parse free-form text.

First cut could just be to launch the browser with that link. If that works reliably, then we could look into downloading and saving a version of the doc.

[bherrmann7]

I understand that this feed has show notes in the description, my question was "is the industry standard including show notes in the description?" I had thought it was popular practice to include show notes in the mp3 metadata.

[pforhan]

Site urls seem to be in the link tag, with that same link sometimes as the GUID and sometimes also in the description, but description is completely free-form. IGN, Major Nelson, and Marketplace all have show pages linked via tags, but are mixed on guid and description usage.

[JonTheNiceGuy]

As far as I understand it, RSS as a format is designed to have the textual content in the feed itself. To ease in complexity, I would be happy with spawning a browser session for the link URL.

With regards to the content of the RSS feed, the GUID should be a globally unique value, but many people will use that as a URL (because the URL for that item is generally seen as a unique ID). The Link tag should be the referrer to the article which is associated with the RSS item.

I personally have never seen an MP3 with the show notes in the MP3 metadata. Having it in the RSS description tag gives the author of the show notes greater flexibility - especially because they can enter full HTML in there.