Podcast Description via API

Question

I'm working on a Rails app involving iTunes podcasts and I'd like to display a description for each podcast. But I cannot figure out a way to pull the description using the iTunes Search API. When I "lookup"/"search" by podcast ID, description is not one of the attributes. I'd be open to using another API to get podcast descriptions(something like Freebase for Wikipedia, for ex.), but searching by podcast title outside of the iTunes API is going to be tricky, given that some podcasts have general names like "Start Cooking." Any ideas? Thank you!

Answer 1

Using the lookup API - you can get some meta data for Podcasts but not all of it (as you noted). Here is an example of the lookup from an NPR Show:

http://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=156274448

In the json response, you want to find the RSS feed URL that the Podcast provider maintains:

"feedUrl": "http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=1056"

When you crawl the feed - the Podcast provider is responsible for providing the Description you are looking for:

<description><![CDATA[NPR's Foreign Desk picks the top story from the day's international coverage  from Morning Edition,....</description>

Answer 2

Elaborating on Ted's answer above...

The original source of a description for a podcast is that podcast's rss feed.

It can be found within the <description> tag, which sits under the <channel> tag.

So, another option to get the description, instead of going to Apple to ask for it, could be to go directly to the source to get it. i.e. once you know the URL of the podcast rss feed, then you can parse it and get the value from the <description> tag.

Details on the official rss spec can be found here.

That is exactly what Apple and other podcast directories would be doing themselvs to get the description. It looks something like this...