Soundcloudbusting
Matt wrote a great article called Ten Years of Podcasting: Fighting Human Nature (although I’m not entirely sure why he put it on Ev’s site instead of—or in addition to—his own). It’s a look back at the history of podcasting, and how it has grown out of its nerdy origins to become more of a mainstream activity. In it, he kindly gives a shout-out to Huffduffer:
…a way to make piecemeal meta-podcasts on the fly built up from random shows (here’s my feed).
Matt has written about how he uses Huffduffer before: a quick introduction to adding your Huffduffer feed to Instacast. It’s equally straightforward with Overcast, and most other iOS podcast apps.
If you use the iOS app Workflow, there’s a nifty tutorial for extracting the audio from YouTube videos, posting the audio to Dropbox, and subscribing in Huffduffer. I’m letting the side down somewhat though: Huffduffer’s API is currently read-only, but it would so much more powerful if you could post from other apps. I need to wrap my head around OAuth to do this. I was hoping to do OwnYourGram-style API with IndieAuth and micropub (once your Huffduffer profile has your website URL, and that URL has rel="me" links to OAuth providers like Twitter, Flickr, or Github, all the pieces should be in place), but alas IndieAuth only works on a domain or subdomain basis so /username URLs are out.
Anyway, back to Matt’s article about podcasting. He writes:
Personally, I like it when new podcasts use Soundcloud for their hosting, because on a desktop computer it means I can easily dip into their archives and play random episodes, scrub to certain segments and get a feel for the show before I subscribe.
It’s true that if you’re sitting in front of a desktop computer, Soundcloud is a great way to listen to an audio file there and then. But it’s a lousy way to host a podcast.
The whole point of podcasting is that it’s time-shifted. You get to listen to the audio you want, when you want. The whole point of Soundcloud is that you listen to audio then and there. That’s great if you’re a musician, looking to make sure that people can’t make copies of your music, but it’s terrible if you’re a podcaster.
To be fair, Soundcloud’s primary audience is still musicians, rather than podcasters, so it makes sense for them to prioritise that use-case. But still, they really go out of their way to obfuscate the actual audio file. Even if the publisher has checked the right box to allow users to download the audio file, the result is a very literal interpretation of that: you can download the file, but you can’t copy the URL and paste it into, say, an app for listening later (and you certainly can’t huffduff it).
Case in point: Matt finishes his article with:
If you don’t have time to read the above, it’s available as a 14min audio file…
That audio file is hosted on Soundcloud. You can listen to it there, or you can listen to it through the embedded player on the article itself. But that’s it. You can’t take it with you. You can’t listen to it later. You can’t, for example, listen to it in your car, even though as Matt says:
…for most Americans, killing time listening to podcasts in a car is a great place.
If you can figure out a way to get at Matt’s audio file (and maybe even huffduff it), I’d be much obliged.
Like Merlin says:
If the episode page for your podcast doesn’t have a clear link to a downloadable audio file?
That ain’t no podcast.
[mic drop]
— Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) December 23, 2014