How to access podcast metadata?

Question

I'm trying to get access to the metadata about podcasts, such as the show notes/description, the show title and the icon image. I'm at least partially using ContentResolver to query for most of the AudioColumns information, but for some reason ALBUM_ART is missing, there seems to be no column for the description, and in general, it's not clear what the mapping is. Since podcasts are not songs, they don't generally have "composers", "artists" and "albums" they have show titles, episode titles, hosts, etc. Is there any information out there on what standards are generally used for podcast metadata and how I can efficiently access it?

Answer 1

I've done a considerable amount of work with podcasts, and have found that there are no standards at all, and there's a huge variety in the metadata you'll find. The media content provider is definitely oriented towards music as opposed to podcasts, and the information it extracts (using the MediaScanner) is all that you'll get for free.

To get better information you'll need to extract it from the media directly. If you have access to the RSS information, you can often get good information (such as description at least) there, but I suspect you probably don't have that.