How to archive your favourite podcasts before they disappear: a beginner's guide
Podcasts, unfortunately, disappear off the Internet quite often. The smaller the podcast, the more likely this is. Fortunately, we can do something to prevent this.
I have a very simple system for archiving podcasts that anyone can easily replicate:
Step 1. Search on archive.org to see if the podcast has already been saved there.
Step 2. Find the podcast’s RSS feed on the podcast’s website or on podcastindex.org.
Step 3. On Windows, paste the podcast’s RSS feed into the free, open source app Podcast Bulk Downloader: https://github.com/cnovel/PodcastBulkDownloader/releases
For Mac and Linux, you can use gPodder: https://gpodder.github.io It’s also free and open source.
Step 4. In Podcast Bulk Downloader, select “Date prefix”. This puts the episode release date in YYYY-MM-DD format at the beginning of the file name, which is important if someone wants to listen to the episodes in chronological order. Then hit “Download”.
In gPodder, go to Preferences → Extensions → check “Rename episodes after download” → Click “Edit config” → Check “extensions.rename_download.add_sortdate”.
Step 5. Create an account on archive.org with an email address you don’t care about. It’s bewildering, but your email address is publicly revealed when you upload any file to archive.org and they do not ever warn you about this. Firefox Relay is a good tool for this: https://relay.firefox.com
Step 6. Fill out the metadata fields on the archive.org, such as title, creator, description, and subject tags (e.g. “podcast”). I recommend including a jpeg or png file (jpeg displays better) of the podcast’s logo or album art in your upload. Whatever image you upload will automatically become the thumbnail. After that, go ahead and upload.
That’s it! You’re done!
If you have any questions or just want to chat about podcast preservation, feel free to email me at didyousayboop@yahoo.com.
Everyone has my permission to copy/paste, republish, and modify this guide. It’s under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.