Easier artwork and metadata
One of the most persistent issues on a major Pinecast page has been the artwork and metadata question that’s posed when you upload your audio. First, some important context.
Why artwork and metadata is hard
Section titled “Why artwork and metadata is hard”The information that you upload to Pinecast is what goes into your RSS feed. This is available to podcast apps that pull your feed, but anyone downloading the episode audio as a file will lose the title, podcast name, and artwork.
Additionally, some podcast apps do not use the artwork as it’s listed in your RSS feed. Instead, they pull the artwork as an image file from inside the audio file’s metadata (e.g., ID3 tags). If the artwork is not correctly added to the metadata, some listeners simply won’t see it.
What we’ve done in the past
Section titled “What we’ve done in the past”In the past, when you chose an audio file, we’d inspect it to ensure it contained artwork and metadata. If it did not, we’d prompt you to add those items. When you added artwork or metaata, we’d change the audio file to include them before we uploaded the file to our servers.
This created a dependency: you can’t save the episode until the audio is uploaded. The audio can’t be uploaded until artwork and metadata are added. And we can’t add the artwork and metadata if they haven’t been given to us yet. For some folks, this was confusing. For others, it was annoying.
What we’re doing now
Section titled “What we’re doing now”You’ll now see episode audio as a field just like you previously did. You’ll also see two new fields:
- A switch to add metadata to your episode. When selected, we’ll automatically add metadata. We recommend leaving this enabled unless you’re setting your own metadata.
- An episode artwork upload field. You can add episode artwork or leave it empty: the field is optional.
What’s different is that we’ll handle the processing on our end: we’ll ensure the artwork and metadata are added after the file has been uploaded and saved. This means you’re not nagged during the upload process. Skipping a step by accident doesn’t require you to scroll back up.
Editing, too
Section titled “Editing, too”One consequence of our old setup was that artwork and metadata were added only at the point that audio was uploaded. If you wanted to change your artwork, it required you to re-upload the audio file. Similarly, changing details like the name of your episode wouldn’t be saved to the metadata.
With the new setup, this all “just works”. You never need to re-upload audio to change artwork or metadata, and the Edit Episode UI should behave exactly as you expect it to.