How To Publish Your Podcast to the iTMS

iTunes 4.9 is out and it places the world of podcasting at everyone's fingertips. This will be a little bit of an in-depth walk through of how to publish your own podcast(s) to the iTMS. Since we don't have an RSS feed for our podcast set up as of yet here at TUAW, I'll use my blog's podcast, the Sample the Web Podcast, as an example (though I don't actually recommend anyone listen to it, because right now it is just a test post using AudioBlog.com; since I dialed in the 'podcast' from my phone, there are some odd sound artifacts that make me sound like I have a very strong lisp; I don't).

In any case, the good news is that all of this, as with most things done by Apple, has been done well so that the entire process takes only a modicum of work from you. Read on after the jump to find out how to publish your podcast to the iTMS....

1. Make sure you have a podcast with its own RSS feed. This How-to isn't about setting up a podcast, so Google it if you don't know how.
2. Make sure you have downloaded and installed iTunes 4.9.
3. Launch iTunes and click on the iTMS link.
4. At the top left menu of the iTMS you will notice a link to "Publish a Podcast." Click on that link (pictured to the right).
5. A page that looks like the one below will come up. In the field in the middle of the page, enter the RSS feed address of your podcast and click submit:
6. A dialog box will pop up asking you to log in to your iTMS account. Why? Well my guess is that this is just in case you upload something you shouldn't, like copyrighted work owned by another. On the main page of each podcast there is a link where you can "Report a Concern..." about the current podcast. Here's a screenshot of the screen where you can rat out any copyright infringers:

   Now that you have been warned and know yourself to be non-copyright-infringing, put in your iTMS account username and password and click on through the dialog.

7. After you have submitted this information, you will be presented with a review page:

   You can categorize your podcast here. You will also see all the associated metadata embedded in your feed. As you can see, I am missing most of this info; however, I cannot edit this in iTunes. I have to actually change the info in my feed to fix this, and since my feed is auto-created by audioblog, I'll have to see if I can tinker with those settings.

8. After you choose your category and check the Explicit Content box, if necessary, then click submit again. You will be met with this screen:

   Notice that your podcast may be reviewed before it is posted.

9. That's it your done.  Now the waiting begins. I submitted my podcast several hours ago and it still hasn't appeared. I'm curious about the criteria used in the review process...