Finding the URL for podcast feeds from an iTunes id. (iTMS API)

Question

I\'m look at a way of turning an iTunes podcast id into the RSS feed that the podcast producer serves.

I\'m aware of the RSS generator, which can be used to generate a f

Answer 1

Through a combination of answers from these two questions, I have found a way to do what I want.

Example of finding podcasts

First: grab a list of podcasts from iTunes, using the RSS generator. I'm not sure how the query parameters work yet, but here is an RSS feed for top tech podcasts in the US.

http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/toppodcasts/sf=143441/limit=25/genre=1318/xml

• sf relates to country, and is optional. I would guess that this defaults to global if absent.
• genre relates to genre, and is optional. I would guess that this defaults to "all genres" is absent.
• limit is optional, and seems to default to 9.

This gives you an Atom feed of podcasts. You'll need to do some sperlunking with XPath to get to the ITMS id of podcast, but you're looking for the numeric id contained in the URL found at the following XPath:

/atom:feed/atom:entry/atom:link[@rel='alernate']/@href

For example, the excellent JavaPosse has an id of 81157308.

The Answer to the Question

Once you have that id, you can get another document which will tell you the last episode, and the original feed URL. The catch here is that you need to use an iTunes user-agent to get this document.

e.g.

wget --user-agent iTunes/7.4.1 \
     --no-check-certificate \ 
     "https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.app.finance.DirectAction/subscribePodcast?id=81157308&wasWarnedAboutPodcasts=true"

This is a plist containing some metadata about the podcast, including the feed URL.

<key>feedURL</key><string>http://feeds.feedburner.com/javaposse</string>

The XPath for this could be something like:

//key[@text='feedURL']/following-sibling::string/text()

Disclaimer

Not entirely sure how stable any of this is, or how legal it is. YMMV.

Answer 2

I searched for a long time to deconstruct the iTunes podcast feed. It's a plist containing meta data, of which one of them is an RSS feed. My blog post How to subscribe to iTunes podcasts on Android has links to code in php and in javascript to extract the URL to the RSS feed from an individual iTunes link.

Answer 3

As soon as you have the id you can use it in lookup as defined in

https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html

You should get what you need by parsing the response with JSON

Answer 4

To elaborate on @juhariis' answer, here's the basics of extracting the feed url from the json (python3):

from urllib.request import urlopen
from urllib.parse import urlparse
import codecs
import json

podcast_url = 'https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/grow-big-always/id1060318873'
ITUNES_URL = 'https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id='
parsed = urlparse(podcast_url)
id = parsed.path.split('/')[-1][2:]
reader = codecs.getreader('utf-8')
with urlopen(ITUNES_URL + id) as response:
    feed = json.load(reader(response))['results'][0]['feedUrl']
print(feed)

Here's a script/module I made, that makes use of this: https://gist.github.com/theychx/f9fad123bef27bebac665847c7884cd9