I found myself in a situation recently that I thought was worth mentioning here. One of the podcasts that I produce has two feeds, one audio and one video. As such, they have separate listings in iTunes. Maybe I’ll talk about the merits of this approach in a future post.

About a month ago I noticed a very prominent shift in the media stats for the audio and video files. Audio downloads went up by about 50% and video downloads went down by 50%. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I didn’t even think to check iTunes.

Several weeks went by and the video stats creeped back up but they were still pretty far below normal levels. I didn’t have time to do a thorough investigation. Then I got an email from a subscriber telling me that my link to the video feed in iTunes was resolving to the audio feed. I quickly opened iTunes and went to my video podcast page. Alas, not video. It was pointing to my audio feed. I actually had a pair of the same feed listed in iTunes.

I was furious. How could this happen? I emailed a friend who is very knowledgeable on these things and has a contact who works on iTunes. After an email to podcasts[at]apple[dot]com I got a pretty quick response. I was told that the iTunes feed was redirected to the audio due to the presence of the ‘itunes:new-feed-url’ tag in my RSS.

I tried to remember how that tag could have gotten in there. Then I remembered that I toyed around with the PodPress podcasting plugin last month. PodPress is a good plugin that I recommend and use quite often. There are some pitfalls with it though and this iTunes tag is one of them.

One thing to point out as well is the fact that PodPress is best suited for a site publishing a single podcast feed. I have not figured out how to get it working on a site with multiple podcast feeds. The other thing to watch out for is a section titled ‘Podcast Feed URL’ in the Standard Settings section of the PodPress dashboard.

The Podcast Feed URL field needs to point to your actual RSS feed that you want iTunes to pull from. So if you use WordPress to power your podcast you site will have a feed something like http://www.mysite.com/feed. If that’s your main podcast feed that that’s what goes in the field. But say you’re using FeedBurner to enhance your feed. Then you want the FeedBurner feed address in that field.

The wrong address in the Podcast Feed URL field will hose your listing in iTunes. So if you’re setting things up with PodPress take care what you enter in that field. And if you’re not 100% on whether or not you will use FeedBurner then perhaps you should wait on submitting to iTunes until after that decision is made.