Strange strings getting used as <title> for episodes in Podcast XML

[gityopr]

I've been wrestling with this trying to figure out how to facilitate testing and reproduction. Many files result in strange podcast episode names.

I have an audiobook file in my dir2cast podcast folder, the file has correct ID3 tags but the podcast episode produced by it has the title "End Credits". I've put that file on wetransfer here (the book is public domain): https://we.tl/t-yRIimxtSTo

According to MP3Tag and Musicbrainz Picard, the file has 7 fields with content: Title, Artist, Album, Year, Genre, Comment, and Album Artist. None of those fields contain the words "End Credits".

The XML file contains this for the relevant file:

<item>
<itunes:author>Murray Bookchin, Todd McGowan - afterword</itunes:author>
<itunes:duration>6:30:23</itunes:duration>
<itunes:summary>End Credits</itunes:summary>
<itunes:subtitle>Murray Bookchin, Todd McGowan - afterword</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:image href="http://[website]/The%20Philosophy%20of%20Social%20Ecology.jpg"/>
<title>End Credits</title>
<link>http://[website]/The%20Philosophy%20of%20Social%20Ecology.m4b</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Jul 2024 01:08:43 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[ End Credits ]]>
</description>
<image>http://[website]/The%20Philosophy%20of%20Social%20Ecology.jpg</image>
<enclosure url="http://[website]/The%20Philosophy%20of%20Social%20Ecology.m4b" length="372016940" type="audio/mp4"/>
</item>

This M4B file does have chapters with chapter titles, but I'm not sure how to interact with them or tell Dir2Cast to ignore them. Where did the contents of itunes:summary and <title> come from? Is there any way to override this?

[ben-xo]

This M4B file does have chapters with chapter titles, but I'm not sure how to interact with them or tell Dir2Cast to ignore them. Where did the contents of itunes:summary and <title> come from? Is there any way to override this?

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with M4B. I assume it's similar to M4A, and that these are embedded tags in the file.

you can examine the tags in files using a variety of tools such as id3v2 or tageditor. If you have any example files you can share with me, i'd be happy to take a look.

Ultimately, the primary use for dir2cast is to autogenerate a podcast using the embedded data in the file. So the podcast will only be as good as the embedded data. You can override the title etc by placing files with overrides - see the README