With their commitment to innovation and fresh ideas, it might be too early to call Warpwire an “old dog,” but they definitely learned a cool new trick recently that has expanded the ways it is now possible to use Warpwire at Duke. When we learned that Apple was migrating content Duke had been hosting in what was formerly called iTunes U to a new space called Apple Podcasts and was no longer supporting the hosting of media files on Apple servers, we needed to find an external RSS feed provider and a new publishing workflow for Duke’s vibrant podcast community. Around this same time, Warpwire was making improvements to their service in the area of audio support, and when we approached them with this challenge, they enthusiastically made the needed changes to allow their product to serve this need.
Some of the key changes include:
- Support for the album art required by Apple Podcasts for feeds and for media
- Support for metadata in the format required to work with iTunes (Warpwire also now supports Dublin Core metadata)
- The ability to change the author of a podcast feed to a non NetID (i.e., the name of a Duke organization)
- Support for formatting text that appears in the Description field for media files. This allows content owners, for example, to include text transcripts for their podcast files that will be available to viewers consuming content through iTunes.
A KB article is available that walks Duke podcasters through the process of creating an RSS feed in Warpwire and publishing it in Apple Podcasts: https://duke.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0028063. If you have any questions or need assistance working with your podcasts in Warpwire, you can contact the OIT Service Desk at https://oit.duke.edu/help
