Feed crashes by adding episodes?

Question

Hi there,I set up podcastfeed to share my private mp3 files at home, so I can subscribe to them at iTunes as a Podcast. For that I created a simple xml file:&lt;?xml version&#x3D;"1.0" encoding&#x3D;"UTF-8"?&gt;&lt;rss xmlns:itunes&#x3D;"http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version&#x3D;"2.0"&gt;&lt;channel&gt;&lt;title&gt;Example Feed&lt;/title&gt;&lt;link&gt;http://192.168.2.117&lt;/link&gt;&lt;language&gt;en-us&lt;/language&gt;&lt;copyright&gt;no&lt;/copyright&gt;&lt;itunes:subtitle&gt;Example&lt;/itunes:subtitle&gt;&lt;itunes:author&gt;noone&lt;/itunes:author&gt;&lt;itunes:summary&gt;x&lt;/itunes:summary&gt;&lt;description&gt;x&lt;/description&gt;&lt;item&gt;&lt;title&gt;01 example&lt;/title&gt;&lt;enclosure url&#x3D;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/1.mp3" length&#x3D;"" type&#x3D;"audio/x-mp3" /&gt;&lt;guid&gt;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/1.mp3"&lt;/guid&gt;&lt;itunes:order&gt;1&lt;/itunes:order&gt;&lt;/item&gt;&lt;item&gt;&lt;title&gt;02 example&lt;/title&gt;&lt;enclosure url&#x3D;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/2.mp3" length&#x3D;"" type&#x3D;"audio/x-mp3" /&gt;&lt;guid&gt;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/2.mp3"&lt;/guid&gt;&lt;itunes:order&gt;2&lt;/itunes:order&gt;&lt;/item&gt;&lt;item&gt;&lt;title&gt;03 example&lt;/title&gt;&lt;enclosure url&#x3D;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/3.mp3" length&#x3D;"" type&#x3D;"audio/x-mp3" /&gt;&lt;guid&gt;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/3.mp3"&lt;/guid&gt;&lt;itunes:order&gt;3&lt;/itunes:order&gt;&lt;/item&gt;&lt;item&gt;&lt;title&gt;example&lt;/title&gt;&lt;enclosure url&#x3D;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/4.mp3" length&#x3D;"" type&#x3D;"audio/x-mp3" /&gt;&lt;guid&gt;"http://192.168.2.117/GD/4.mp3"&lt;/guid&gt;&lt;itunes:order&gt;4&lt;/itunes:order&gt;&lt;/item&gt;&lt;/channel&gt;&lt;/rss&gt;It works fine for a few episodes! But by adding &gt;20 items to the feed, the feed crashes and is unusable. What am I doing wrong?

Roger Wilmut1 · Answer

Only one thing strikes me in feed itself, which is that possibly you should have a space between the closing double quotes for  &#x27;length&#x27; and the opening double quotes for &#x27;type&#x27; - however I don&#x27;t think this is the problem or it would have emerged immediately.As your feed is entirely local, and I don&#x27;t know how you are constructing it, I&#x27;m afraid there&#x27;s no way of detecting the problem. iTunes is geared to feeds which are online, and I don&#x27;t know how it reacts to local feeds; I tried subscribing to the local copy of my own podcast feed and iTunes wouldn&#x27;t recognize it. If iTunes is working for you with 20 items, but it all crashes on 21 items then the problem may lie with the method you are using to create the feed, but as the feed isn&#x27;t available online I can&#x27;t look at it to see whether there is a problem.

CSchloemp · Answer

Hello,thank you for your answer! The Feed is hosted on a local server.I also tried to reach the feed from a webbrowser, same problem. If there were too many items, the feed is shown as emty. So for me iTunes isn&#x27;t the problem. It seems like the feed gets broken, if there were too many items. 20 isn&#x27;t an exact limit.I am not creating the feed in a special way. I am just adding items to the xml file.

Roger Wilmut1 · Answer

If the coding for all the episodes is there when you examine the feed in a text editor such as TextEdit on a Mac, but when viewed in a browser or subscribed to in iTunes it comes up empty, then it&#x27;s likely you have managed to introduce one of the errors which can break a feed - for example an ampersand by itself, or &#x27;curly quotes&#x27; in place of straight ones because you&#x27;ve been working in a word processor.FeedValidator can check a feed, but you will have to place it on a server available to the internet to be able to do so. Similarly I can have a look at it (though I would also use FeedValidator as a guide) but only if you place it on an open server.