As a musician with a degree in computer science, I stand in a good position to help musicians with their common programming issues. With this article, I will start a series of How-Tos aimed at coding dilemmas commonly faced by musicians.

How To Create an iTunes RSS Feed

You are probably familiar with RSS feeds, even if you don't know them by name. Everything that you subscribe to using My Yahoo or iTunes is distributed using RSS feeds.

RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication. It is a way for people to distribute time based content via the internet. For instance, if you want to release a weekly editorial, enclosing it in an RSS feed would make sense.

RSS, in its original form, is very similar to html. It uses a few simple tags to tell other pieces of software how to use it. Unfortunately, to use iTunes, RSS becomes a bit more complicated. Still, if you can follow some basic instructions, then we can get you up and running in iTunes in no time at all.

The first thing you need to understand is a tag. A tag on the internet is similar to a tag in the real world. If you wanted to tag an item with a price, you would put a sticker on it that says $5.00. Similarly, if you wanted to tag something with a price on the internet, you might use a tag that says <price>$5.00</price>. So a tag is something that is enclosed by less-than and greater-than symbols that says something about what it is attached to. In this case, the price tags denote that $5.00 represents a price.

That's basically all you need to know to use the examples I've set up. Take a look at example 1 (download each of these files and open them with WordPad):

iTuness RSS Feed Example 1
iTuness RSS Feed Example 1 Filled

Compare the two files. You can see that in the second file, I replaced all of the capitalized text with a basic example.

To build your own RSS feed, you can start with the second example, and replace the capitalized text with your own text.

iTuness RSS Feed Example 2

To run an RSS feed by hand, you need to update the file each time that you add a new item to your feed. Notice that the items should be in reverse order. This is so that they appear in order from top to bottom when a reader views them in an rss reader like iTunes.

This concludes my basic introduction. If you have any questions, post them in the comments section, and I will try to answer them all.