There are two potential “title” fields in for each episode:

• The standard <title> tag from the RSS spec
• A special <itunes:title> tag within Apple’s podcast namespace

Apple created their name space as a way to encourage podcasters to remove meta information - most commonly episode numbering - from the title field to allow for a more enjoyable reading experience. By way of example, consider these two fields title fields for a single episode of the podcast Today in iOS:

<title>Tii 0505 - WWDC 2021, iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and watchOS 8</title>

<itunes:title>WWDC 2021, iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and watchOS 8</itunes:title>

The first starts with Tii 0505 - a legacy numbering system that literally means the 505th episode of Today in iOS (Tiii), and is designed to be used by podcast listening apps that do not extract <itunes:season> or <itunes:episode> values from the item and display along with the title of the episode.

An example from Overcast, a popular podcast listening app that does not extract the optional item tags, showing the full contents of the standard <title> tag:

The second is designed to be use by Apple Podcasts, a listening app that does extract and display the <itunes:season> or <itunes:episode> values from the item and display along with the title of the episode, as shown in this example, where you can see the value of the <itunes:episode> tag has been extracted and placed at the beginning of the <itunes:title> tag, followed by a period and a space:

A good rule of thumb is to check the feed for instances of the optional <itunes:season> or <itunes:episode> tags. If found, use the <itunes:title> tag and disregard the default <title> tag.

Page authors: evoterra

Site authors: James Cridland Evo Terra