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18 Comments

Looking for a podcast API

Hey IH,

I'm looking for a podcast API to query for shows, episodes and podcast data.

I've found https://www.listennotes.com/api/, it's great, but the Terms of Service don't allow for any storing/caching of the data, also on the paid plan.

As I need to store some of the podcast data in my backend for my use case, this doesn't work for me.

Do you know of a good alternative?

Thanks!

  1. 3

    I launched Taddy's Podcast API: https://taddy.org/developers/podcast-api.

    We allow storing/caching of any data you get back from our API + we don't have the requirement to show a 'Powered by' logo in your app (like Listen Notes does)

    Also, I think we have much fairer pricing to Listen Notes.
    500 requests per month is free
    Up to 100,000 requests per month for $50/month.

    1. 2

      Awesome, will be checking this out for a new idea I'm working on!

      1. 2

        Ha, its so funny that Im the second person discovering this on a 2 year old thread. Thanks for sharing @dmathewwws. I had a look and it works great! Will be using it for my project

  2. 1

    Hi Robbie. I hope you are doing great. I'm trying to do some market research on the subject of podcasting in Spanish. According to what I've found there are aproximately ~90k podcasts in such language. However, what I'm REALLY interested in is what podcast hosting company are these ~90k using. FYI, I have zero developing knowledge, but after stumbling upon this thread I wonder if the database you are working on could provide such info. I know this is a service ListenNotes offers, but the price for bulk data is just way over my possibilities. Is this a project you'd be interested in? THANK YOU! (oh, sorry for the long post!)

    1. 1

      Hey there, I have not built the API yet, however this could be something I would be able to provide once its built. Unfortunately a realistic estimate would be that I will still need several weeks or months to get to that point as I'm only hustling on this on the side. Happy to keep you updated if it will still be of interest then!

      1. 2

        Hey! This sounds really interesting and would love to chat about it, I have a good friend in the space (and I'm an audio company founder myself)

        1. 1

          Hey - thanks for the interest! Unfortunately, I've not been able to put much time into this in the past months as I was focusing on my other business. I'll be happy to answer any questions though, did learn a abit about podcasts APIs & co in the meantime :D

      2. 2

        Hi Robbie, Thanks for your quick response! Of course, I get it, coding this must be very time-consuming. I hope you manage to pull it off and have fun while at it! I'll stay put :)

  3. 1

    I ended up with writing my own scrapers for running https://metapodlet.schakko.de.
    Not every podcast site supports RSS and I wanted also an aggregation for some YouTube podcast records (e.g. for TheFutur YT channel).

    Currently, I can aggregate media from FiresideFm, GetShuffleApp, SimpleCast, SquareSpace, TransistorFm and YouTube.

    1. 1

      Cool, thanks for sharing. I have very little knowledge of how building scrapers works in general, definitely something I want to learn more about in the future. Is the general concept for your scrapers to just randomly query public sources where those podcasts are listed (i.e. the ones you mentioned) and index them in some form?

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        Yes exactly, I scrape every podcast once a day, store the relevant data inside a database and send an aggregated email with new podcast episodes afterwards.

  4. 1

    I honestly abandoned a side project once because of how hard it was to find a podcast API 😅

    Best of luck!

    1. 1

      I was almost at that point, too 😅 I think for many purposes, listennotes actually does a great job, but maybe I'll try to offer an API myself at some point. Now a few days into the project and I'm starting to get a pretty good grip on combining iTunes API and RSS parsing to build my own database.

  5. 1

    Did some more research and found an alternative that requires a little more work, but is probably the way I will choose:

    • use a combination of the public iTunes API and the Spotify API for search to find podcasts and get their RSS feed URLs
    • parse the RSS feed and store the data in my own database

    (I believe all podcasts that will be relevant for my use case should be on either iTunes and/or Spotify, so this should work)

    If anyone is interested in this, I'll be happy to share my progress, just message me.

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      Those APIs should work just fine, and you do commonly need to do the parsing, so you're on the right track. I built an entire interactive podcast platform like that!

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        How did you get past the volume? When I tried to do this - i keep running in to slow downs parsing 1.2 million RSS feeds (number of podcasts in itunes) - how did you keep them all in sync? Or were you not parsing the whole store?

        1. 1

          Definitely not parsing the whole store! Anytime someone searched for a podcast, I’d add a queue entry to retrieve it and sync. Or if it showed up in a category. Then I’d do some queue processing to keep things sync’d. Took some fine tuning but that VAST majority of podcasts have no listeners, so this ended up being a nice way to do it.

      2. 1

        Great, thanks for the note!

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