| Listen to Podcasts
add podcasts to your radio stream |
How to use RadioWeave as a Podcatcher:
Podcasts are audio programs syndicated through the web. There are tons of podcasts available, on just about every topic. There are far too many good podcasts (on so many topics) to want to manage them individually. So RadioWeave allows you to combine all of your favorite podcasts into one streaming radio experience.
How RadioWeave manages long podcasts: The RadioWeave listening experience is one of weaving together multiple audio sources into something that is always changing and interesting and different. Many podcasts are very long, often an hour or longer. To make these longer podcasts play better with the RadioWeave experience, we break them up into smaller segments. These segments will still play in order, but will interspersed with the listener's other chosen content types (unless the listener explicitly chooses to hear a particular podcast in its entirety). If podcasters don't provide information on how to segment their podcasts, RadioWeave will automatically provide the segmentation and blending to make a non-disruptive listening experience.
Note to podcasters: If you are someone who creates podcasts, learn how you can tag your podcasts for segmentation, feedback, voting, and revenue sharing.
Follow these instructions to add podcasts to your audio stream:
- Check if the podcast channel already exists
- If the podcast channel already exists, add it to your stream.
- If the podcast channel does not exist, create a new channel.
- Select channel type "podcast"
- Enter podcast URL
- Enter podcast name
- Modify optional settings
- Create the channel
1. Check if the podcast channel already exists
Using the search field I've entered "scientific american" to find any of the podcasts released by the excellent Scientific American magazine.
Searching shows that two channels already exist for "scientific american" so I can just click on the channel that I want to add it to my weave (see step 2). If searching yielded no results, I would then make the channel (as shown in step 3).
2. If the podcast channel already exists, add it to your stream.
In the previous step, a search for "scientific american" found existing channels. Clicking on one of those channels opens the channel explorer view, from which I can click on "add to weave".
"60-Second Science" is now part of of my radio, as represented in the weave as the channel "podcast:60-Second Science".
Done.
3. If the podcast channel does not exist, create a new channel.
I'm a fan of NPR's "Science Friday" show, which is available in podcast form, but my search for "science friday" found nothing. So I will create a "Science Friday" podcast channel now.
First, from the "contribute" tab I will click on the "new channel" option.
4. Select channel type "podcast"
5. Enter podcast URL
Now enter the URL for the RSS stream for this podcast. The RSS URL can usually be found at the website for whoever created this podcast. Search for terms like "RSS", "subscribe", "XML", "radio", or "iTunes".
The URL for NPR's Science Friday podcast is "http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510221", which I've entered here.
6. Enter podcast name
Now enter the URL for the RSS stream for this podcast. The RSS URL can usually be found at the website for whoever created this podcast. Search for terms like "RSS", "subscribe", "XML", "radio", or "iTunes".
This URL for NPR's Science Friday podcast is "http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510221", which I've entered here.
7. Modify optional settings
The default settings will be fine for most podcasts. I've highlighted the ones that I've changed for this podcast. The fields are:
- description - You should enter a good description for the podcast channel to help other users find the podcast and decide if they want to add it to their weave. It's also good practice to provide pointers to the source of the podcast.
- say title - Select this option if each release of the podcast has a unique description that the listeners may want to hear before each track.
- max entries - The maximum number of podcasts to keep in this channel. Old podcasts will be removed as new ones are added.
- expire - How long tracks entered in this channel should live (if max entries does not push them out). For this particular channel, a new batch of channels is added every Friday, so keeping them for 14 days will keep the most recent Fridays' entries.
- portion - This describes how to handle podcasts if they exceed the maximum allowed part duration. complete will break the full podcast into multiple segments. sample will just extract a middle section.
- total duration - The maximum length of podcasts (including all of its segments) that will be accepted into this channel.
- part duration - Maximum length of any individual segment of a podcast.
8. Create the channel
If all of the fields are to your liking, click on "create this channel". The podcast channel will be created and added to your weave. Tracks should start to appear in this channel in a few minutes. Sometimes podcast servers are iffy, and so it may take a day or two for this channel to reach a steady state.
Congratulations. You have made a podcast channel for radio.
