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You should also give a look at Soundcloud, the platform has multiple dedicated features for podcasters, including RSS, embedding, analytics
But the best feature is their built-in commenting system allowing your listener to let comments or allowing yourself to specify chapters, add "footnotes", etc
IIRC, it's < $10/month for unlimited upload, unlimited listening etc;
And if you plan to upload things privately to only support embedding on your website, you should even be able to share 1 account for different projects
Thanks @moul , really good take on podcast hosting. Never though of SC like this.
I guess with the RSS from SC you can do the submission to Apple, Google, Spotify etc podcast directories.
For now I am heavily considering Simplecast because of the unlimited uploads, the automatic submissions to directories and the custom domain website they offer.
Will check the SC podcast thingy now, thanks again.
Yep, I confirm, I've 2 SoundCloud-based podcasts that are published on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc
And since, it's just a RSS, you can proxy the RSS, i.e., to show your domain name or just to be sure to be able to switch to another provider without changing the RSS.
Another cool option, is about adding more features to the RSS, i.e., some services takes a podcast RSS as input and generates a new one that changes stream URIs in order to get more analytics are prepend ads
Summary -> SoundCloud provides a very nice interface, especially their player with comment, but it's still a "standard podcast RSS provider", so you are not vendor-locked
SoundCloud only has limited uploads on the free offer, but as soon as you pay the <$10/m, you get unlimited uploads too
And when you talk about "directories", if you talk about Spotify, Apple etc, it's a one-time setup, nothing to do when you add new episodes
About custom domains, as I said, I also prefer to have a custom domain (mostly in order to not be vendor-locked), so I just configured Netlify proxy with this one-line configuration file:
Result: custom domain, unlimited uploads, super cool player, available on all directories, absolutely no manual maintenance -> I only uploading a new episode on SoundCloud with the wanted metadata
Hey @marc, I plan to automate sending a message on a discord channel with the changelog of #sgtm.
It would be nice if you provide a webhook system or maybe just an RSS for now? this way I can easily configure posting with Zapier :)
Yes, Zapier integration would be very useful for a bunch of things. Definitely want to add this at some point.
RSS would be quicker to implement. But there's a bunch of different ways to implement it. And people might have different preferences depending on the integration they want to build.
I'll give this some thought the coming days. Feel free to ping me in a week to check the status.
z-index issue when you view an image in fullscreen from the user profile
Consider adding back the day delimiter now? :)
Yep, I confirm, I've 2 SoundCloud-based podcasts that are published on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc
And since, it's just a RSS, you can proxy the RSS, i.e., to show your domain name or just to be sure to be able to switch to another provider without changing the RSS.
Another cool option, is about adding more features to the RSS, i.e., some services takes a podcast RSS as input and generates a new one that changes stream URIs in order to get more analytics are prepend ads
Summary -> SoundCloud provides a very nice interface, especially their player with comment, but it's still a "standard podcast RSS provider", so you are not vendor-locked
SoundCloud only has limited uploads on the free offer, but as soon as you pay the <$10/m, you get unlimited uploads too
And when you talk about "directories", if you talk about Spotify, Apple etc, it's a one-time setup, nothing to do when you add new episodes
About custom domains, as I said, I also prefer to have a custom domain (mostly in order to not be vendor-locked), so I just configured Netlify proxy with this one-line configuration file:
Result: custom domain, unlimited uploads, super cool player, available on all directories, absolutely no manual maintenance -> I only uploading a new episode on SoundCloud with the wanted metadata
Thanks so much for this detailed explanation. Seems like a really simple and good setup.