Three titles

Podcaster has three different ways of giving titles to a podcast episode: title, episode.title, and episode.itunesTitle.

---
title: Entering a new phase
episode:
  title: S1E1, Entering a new phase (The Power of the Daleks)
  itunesTitle: Entering a new phase (The Power of the Daleks)
---

Here’s how the docs describe them:

field	value
`title`	The title of the post on the website; by default, this will also be the title of the podcast episode.
`episode.title`	The title of the episode if it’s different from the title of the post, above. If omitted, `title` is used instead.
`episode.itunesTitle`	A specific episode title for use in Apple Podcasts only. (Apple Podcasts doesn’t allow episode numbers in titles, so if you want to include episode numbers elsewhere, you need to specify a separate episode title for Apple Podcasts.)

Most of the time, title will be enough on its own. But here’s why you might specify the other two.

`episode.title`

title specifies the title of the post on the website. But if you want podcast players to display a different title, you specify that title as episode.title.

Episodes of our podcast Flight Through Entirety have both a title and a topic. The title is a fun quote from the conversation, while the topic is the name of the Doctor Who story we’re discussing. We use the title as the post title on the website, but we provide both the title and the topic to podcast players. Like this:

---
title: Plummeting Towards Sheffield
topic: Twice upon a Time
episode: 
  title: Plummeting Towards Sheffield (Twice upon a Time)
---

And so the post on the site will have the title Plummeting Towards Sheffield, but in podcast players, the episode title will be Plummeting Towards Sheffield (Twice upon a Time).

Tip

You could use a directory data file and the eleventyComputed property to automatically calculate episode.title from title and topic.

episode-posts.json

{
  "eleventyComputed": {
    "episode.title": "{{ title }} ({{ topic }})"
  }
}

`episode.itunesTitle`

Some podcasts include the episode number in their episode titles, but Apple Podcasts doesn’t want you to do that. And so you can specify a separate Apple Podcasts-only title as episode.itunesTitle.

---
title: Plummeting Towards Sheffield
episode:
  episodeNumber: 296
  title: "296: Plummeting Towards Sheffield"
  itunesTitle: Plummeting Towards Sheffield
---

(The Accidental Tech Podcast feed and the feeds on Relay specify separate Apple Podcasts titles for their episodes for precisely this reason.)

Tip

Again, this is also the sort of thing you could use a directory data file and eleventyComputed to calculate.

{
  "eleventyComputed": {
    "episode.title": "{{ episode.episodeNumber }}: {{ title }}",
    "episode.itunesTitle": "{{ title }}"
  }
}