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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, it’s one of my biggest irritations how it’s becoming more and more difficult by the day to find the RSS feed underlying any given podcast.

To me, a podcast always just was just an RSS feed of type audio. If you don’t provide that feed, you’re not a podcast. You’re something else.

These walled gardens are rolling in and claiming territory over what was a beautiful bastion of freedom. I hate it so much.

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What podcast client do you use? Every podcast in the iTunes directory has a public RSS feed. If you're having trouble figuring out the feed from that directory, you can use a tool to show you the link from the podcast's directory page. For example, paste Smartless' page https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/smartless/id1521578868

into https://www.labnol.org/podcast/

to get https://rss.art19.com/smartless

At this point, just about the only podcasts that don't have public RSS cost money, now that Spotify has abandoned its exclusives strategy. If you were subscribed to a public feed that moved to Spotify exclusive, it's probably started repopulating in the last year.

If you are referring to YouTube shows, all Youtube channels have RSS feeds in the format https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCX6OQ3D... (UCX... is a channel ID.)

Do someone knows if it is possible to get a RSS feed for a podcast on spotify? If yes, how do you do in spotify (or other ways) to see a podcast RSS feed?

If it’s hosted by Spotify, the easiest way is to plug in its Apple Podcast URL to a tool like the one I linked. Try Joe Rogan’s for an example of this (his RSS is hosted by Spotify’s Anchor and every podcast index has that link.)

If the podcast is just distributed to Spotify, as most are, then the feed will be hosted someowhere else.

Yes: https://rssfeedasap.com/rss-feed-from-spotify or use Google Podcasts.

Is it even possible to submit a podcast to Spotify, Apple, etc. without an RSS feed

https://support.spotify.com/us/podcasters/article/your-rss-f...

https://help.anchor.fm/hc/en-us/articles/4402979021723-What-...

AFAIK, every podcast has an RSS feed and these are searchable via itunes.apple.com or another aggregator API.

If a website does not include a link to an RSS feed that does not necessarily mean there is no available feed.

Below is how I retrieve and store podcast feeds from itunes.apple.com. Alternatively I use api.podcastindex.org or api.fyyd.de.

All the podcasts in the collections have .rss/.xml feeds.

Are there any examples of podcasts not found in these collections that have no .rss/.xml feed.

     #!/bin/sh
     read x 
     echo "https://itunes.apple.com/search?media=podcast&entity=podcast&term=$x&limit=200&offset=${1-0}" \
     |sed 's/ /+/g;s/++/+/g' \
     |yy025  \
     |(yy084 28 "$x offset=${1-0}";nc -vv h1 80) \
     |yy084

The output of yy084 is input to SQLite. For example,

     echo k12 educational software|1.sh|sqlite3 1.db

     echo select url from t1 where t1.query glob \'\*k12?educational?software\*\'|sqlite3 1.db

     https://k12techtalkpodcast.com/feed.xml

     du -hc /usr/bin/yy025 /usr/bin/yy084 /usr/bin/nc

     48K   /usr/bin/yy025
     128K  /usr/bin/yy084
     84K   /usr/bin/nc
     260K  total

     readelf -d  /usr/bin/yy025 /usr/bin/yy084 /usr/bin/nc|grep .

     File: /usr/bin/yy025
     There is no dynamic section in this file.
     File: /usr/bin/yy084
     There is no dynamic section in this file.
     File: /usr/bin/nc
     There is no dynamic section in this file.

Of course this could also be done using curl and jq or other contraptions.

    du -hc /usr/bin/curl /usr/bin/jq /usr/lib/libcurl.so.4.8.0 /usr/lib/libjq.so.1.0.4

    260K  /usr/bin/curl
    32K   /usr/bin/jq
    740K  /usr/lib/libcurl.so.4.8.0
    372K  /usr/lib/libjq.so.1.0.4
    1.4M  total

(Opinion: There should be more open repositories of these feeds and other metadata not controlled by commercial entities like Apple.)

<sarcasm>I'm sure that everyone who listens to podcasts can figure out how to do this.</sarcasm>

The obfuscation of RSS from podcasts (or completel disconnection from it) is a problem. I'm in the "if it doesn't have a feed it isn't a podcast" camp personally. I have no problem with there being login-only feeds for paid subscribers, or even feeds that are only teasers to sign up, but RSS is a core feature of podcasts. If there's no feed, then it's a subscription channel not a podcast.

https://www.rssboard.org/news/219/downloading-50000-podcast-...

podcast-standard.org:

"The data presented on this website is derived from a collection of 155785 podcasts, with a total of 17648609 episodes, sourced from the iTunes and fyyd podcast directories."

Those are public resources. Anyone can access them for free.

To search:

https://podcast-standard.org/search/podcasts/?q=%s

The second "S" in RSS stands for simple. Why make a "simple" standard. Perhaps because it creates flexibility for everyone who wants to publish a podcast, everyone who wants to host a podcast, and everyone who wants to search and retrieve a podcast feed. NB. RSS is focused on feeds, which are nothing more than marked up text files. It does not address listening to a podcast. Listening requires an audio player. A podacst listener may choose any audio player they prefer. RSS feeds just provide a URL for the audio file. Listening is outside the scape of RSS.

Because RSS simplifies publishing, hosting, searching and retrieving feeds, there an endless options for how to do these things, e.g., how to search and retrieve a podcast feed. This means that way that one person searches and retrieves a podcast feed may differ from the way another persons does it. There are hundreds of computer languages that could be used to search and retrieve, dozens if not hundreds of existing programs that could be used, and countless different approaches to accomplish this relatively simple task.

Hence, the way that I search for a podcast feed may differ from the way someone else does it, and vice versa. One could use relatively tiny, simple programs written in minutes by potentially anyone, even a naive end-user like me, or one could relatively large, complex programs written by multi-billion dollar companies that provide advertising services or by their "non-profit" business partners, e.g., Mozilla. These programs are so large and complex almost no one outside of the companies wants to modify them, even when they dislike what the programs do. In case of any doubt, in the preceding sentence, "programs" means "modern" web browsers.

Thus a benefit of keeping a standard "simple" is that is allows for "There is more than one way to do it." Gigantic, complex programs and the involvement of multi-billion dollar companies is not a requirement. Ironically, Apple, a 350+ billion dollar corporation with a closed source web browser running on non-free operating systems, has probably the most complete directory for locating RSS feeds. Go figure.

Something that might be useful is if RSS feeds were mirrored. As such, there would be mutiple URLs from which a feed could be retrieved. This would allow aggregators to fetch the feed from multiple alternative sources.

Joe Rogan ceased his podcast the moment he signed with Spotify. The Joe Rogan Experience lives in a walled garden and I stopped paying attention to it as a result. Did the move get Spotify more subscriptions? Maybe. It turns out he recently renegotiated his contract to include other outlets, which is telling.

Is it even possible to submit a podcast to Spotify without an RSS feed

https://support.spotify.com/us/podcasters/article/your-rss-f...

I don't use podcasts, but I always found it strange that people speak of podcasting as this open thing (because of RSS) while the audio files are usually hosted inside walled gardens (?). The RSS file is nothing but a link to the audio file, right? Or am I missing something?

There's metadata as well, title, episode description. Everything is just a standard RSS item except for the podcast specific stuff. You can read it with a standard RSS reader.

Regardless of who is hosting the audio, if you can get the free, the audio files are publicly available without an account.

The audio file is hosted on any HTTP server. That is very open web. Except on Spotify which is closed and arguably not actually a podcasting service.

There’s nothing walled garden about the file storage IME. You could use an IPFS link if you wanted too…though without a proxy I doubt most clients would be able to download it.

The podcaster can put those files on any server. You can host yourself (e.g., with WordPress) or pay someone else to do it for you. The apps you listen with pretty much don't host the audio, though there are technical exceptions.

Me too, and I run a podcast hosting service. When I do customer support, I use https://getrssfeed.com/

Podcast have a RFC MUST for RSS feeds.

"On a related note, it's one of my biggest irritations how it's becoming more and more difficult by the day to find the RSS feed underlying any given podcast."

It is unclear if this statement is intended to mean it's becoming more difficult specifically for the author, or more difficult in general, for everyone.

Please offer some examples of (free) podcasts to support the statement showing how it is "more difficult" to find the .rss/.xml feed.

In return I will demonstrate how to "easily" find the feed for the examples given.

It's a pretty unreasonable request. Unless parent, after noticing the trend, began to keep track of each instance in order to write a blogpost or something, they're not going to recall any unless there's a particular stark and irksome example that they still can't access.

Personally I agree. This is getting harder and harder to do. Often there's a way to finally find the rss if you dig enough, but I remember cracking out a web inspector in the last year to do it.

This is effectively blocking 99% of people from pulling these things out of walled services, which is the important question, not whether it is technically feasible to retrieve.

Even ignoring that anecdote, if someone has to find a "convert iTunes link to RSS" website, it relies on them even knowing what RSS is, knowing that iTunes podcasts have an underlying RSS feed powering them, etc.

RSS used to be something that only the marginally more literate than usual understoof how to use, and was ubiquitous. But if this trend continues, it'll be more akin to plan files.

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