How to access podcast metadata?

Question

I am trying to access metadata about podcasts such as show notes / description, show title and icon image. I at least partially used ContentResolver to request most of the AudioColumns information, but for some reason there is no ALBUM_ART, it seems that there is no column for the description, and in general it does not know what the display is. Since podcasts are not songs, they usually do not have “composers”, “artists” and “albums”, they have show names, episode names, hosts, etc. Is there any information about which standards are commonly used for podcast metadata and how can I effectively access it?

Answer 1

I did a lot of work with podcasts and found that there are no standards at all, and there is a huge variety in the metadata that you will find. The media content provider is definitely focused on music, not podcasts, and the information it retrieves (using MediaScanner) is all that you get for free.

To get the best information, you need to extract it from the media directly. If you have access to RSS information, you can often get good information (such as a description), but I suspect that you probably do not know this.