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Free Podcasting Hosts?
TheZorch asks: "I'm looking for a free online Podcast hosting site which offers RSS feeds. The feeds are important for submitting to iTunes. I've found Odeo, however uploading to the site is difficult and hangs about half-way through, most of the time. Currently, my Podcasts are being stored at Archive.org, the Creative Commons Internet Archive, but the site doesn't generate RSS feeds which allow you to post your podcasts on iTunes. Uploading large files via HTTP is a pain even on a cable modem. I'd prefer to be able to do it via FTP. Does anyone know of a good free Podcasting host with RSS feeds and reliable uploads for large files?"
Web hosting's pretty cheap these days - for instance, I get loads of disk space and about a terabyte of monthly bandwidth on the vaguely-reliable, cheap-and-cheerful Dreamhost. [NOTE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF AFFILIATE LINK!]
I've no idea if there are any off-the-shelf, open source 'podcasting' packages available (any suggestions, anyone?), but RSS is very simple and it could be worth learning just enough PHP to write your own, incredibly basic system for generating it yourself.
But wait, this is the difficult solution, isn't it?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Maybe we would enjoy reading this: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/10/03/itunes-music- sore/
Wotta Coincidence!
The lunch should be tasty, but nutritionally balanced. I'm thinking it should start with a small salad, tossed greens, crushed pepper, oil & vinegar, nothing too fancy. Some porto bello mushrooms would be nice. Then perhaps a small cup of soup, either a light tomato or some gazpacho. Some of that freshly-grated parmesan would go great with either, I'm thinking. For the main event, no big deal, howza bout some roast beef, thinly sliced, on a French baquette, lightly buttered, and some au jus to dip it in, A half-bottle of a good Aussie Shiraz to help it down. Coffee and cookies for dessert.
You let me know how your search works out; I'll keep you posted on mine, 'kay?
Is it audio or video? How large are your files? If you can't upload a 20MB file without it dying in the middle, then your connection has some sort of problem.
I'm searching, for posts, with complete, overuse, and, misuse, of the comma.
Sound waves should be free!
Go video and upload to Youtube. Even though it still is an HTTP upload, most of your problems are solved right there...
It looks like OurMedia.org, which uses archive.org for storage has RSS for its users.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Never used them, but have heard that they're good.
http://www.libsyn.com/
This guy's the limit!
I've heard that FeedBurner should handle most of the work. I don't think they host, but you just upload the links to the files and it generates the feed.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I believe you can sign up to Feedburner and have the service take your iTunes-unfriendly RSS feed and generate a new podcast / iTunes friendly one. Also provides basic stats too. Might be a solution?
When I started a podcast project last year, I used FeedForAll to manually generate the feed. I had no special access to the site, so I downloaded new episodes to get the mp3 tag info (time, length), added the episodes and uploaded the update.
Since then, I've written a quick perl script that runs every hour and grabs all the information including downloading the mp3 and checking the tags. I'd automate the whole thing but there is some massaging of descriptions that wouldn't work.
Check out cpan.org - feedburner seems to be the lastest thing and there's a perl module to integrate with it. One thing - I didn't see a lot of support there for the itunes namespace extensions.
Sure we all like free things, both beer and that other kinds that's s popular around here. But isn't this Slashdot? Don't we all have web servers lost in our couch cushions? I'm not even terribly skilled, but I could write an automated RSS feed in pretty short order in language I'd never seen before on some cheap, $5 a month hosting plan.
Pay for it. If you don't value what you have to say enough to sacrifice a little for it, no one else wants to hear it either.
To offload the bandwidth you might consider using a P2P CDN like Red Swoosh (www.redswoosh.net). The nice thing about P2P is the more people you deliver to, the more efficient it becomes in pulling from peer, and the faster the downloads go.
I believe Archive.org does allow FTP uploading. http://ourmedia.org/ uses a proprietary uploader, or did when we used it earlier this year.
You could also look at http://blip.tv/ and http://revver.com./ Both provide RSS and hosting for free and with Revver you can actually make money.
We use http://libsyn.com/ for some of our media hosting as well. They are good, reliable and cheap. They have FTP and tools to create a blog onsite (though we use a drupal site for our main site).
Good luck and create good podcasts!
Podshow do it all for free - if you don't count the little advert at the end. The site is bright and I think it is nicely laid out.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Ask Google, bitch.
Maybe it sounds harsh but Ask Slashdot is becoming more and more "I don't want to google for it, so I'll just use slashdot users as a search engine.".
In the past there would have been a different article here... it would of been one of a guy who was unhappy about his initial RSS and podcast solution from Company X and his experience in working with companies Y,Z and R until he came up with something that worked for him.
I'm just waiting for the day some 15 year old kid is on here posting in Ask Slashdot because he needs help with some code in his high school Java course. On that day I will disavow any knowledge of slashdot or it's users.
I've been podcasting with Libsyn for almost a year and a half, and I would recommend them heartily over any free services out there.
The basic Libsyn accounts costs $5/month for 100MB upload a month, then $10/month for 250MB upload, scaling upwards. If you are using the basic account, and say one month you need to bump upwards for more space, there is a $5.00 dollar charge to change service levels, and no charge to scale back down. This is an excellent option, if you have one particularly busy month out of the year, and don't necessarily need the more expensive account all the time. There is also no bandwidth limit.
There is an ftp upload, as well as other features like future publishing (uploading a podcast, and having it published, i.e made available at a future date). Libsyn is probably in the 99.5% uptime bracket. Maybe once a month there are a few hours of downtime for upgrades, or the occasional hardware problem. Users are always notified of these events, and these aren't an issue for me, given the overall excellent quality of the service.
Libsyn RSS feeds are automatic, and are actually integrated with the Feedburner feed service, which provides scads more functionality than the basic vanilla RSS. There are also a host of Podcast content listing sites out there, that automatically index all Libsyn feeds, so without any effort on your part, your podcast will be indexed on probably 20 or more Podcast aggregators.
As for iTunes. When iTunes first starting listing Podcasts, all Libsyn feeds were automatically included in their Podcast store, but this has been tightened up recently. Podcasts now have to jump through more hoops to get listed, and generally seem to have to have an established track record. Try to get on iTunes anyway you can though, as over 80% of my initial listeners come through iTunes (though this trends down towards 2/3's over time for each individual Podcast).
If you do buy cheap hosting, wordpress has really good podcast support. We use the PHP script dirCaster on our site. It scans a directory of mp3's and outputs an RSS feed, and other than our difficulties getting ID3v2 to be read, things seem to work flawlessly. We use feedburner to make up for dirCaster's limitations.
If you need free podshow is definitely your best option. You get feeds, a commenting system, blog, and stats. Plus it's got the built-in social networking mechanism that may help you build an audience. Just go to podshow.com and create an account and show page and you're off and running. If you don't like the somewhat cluttered myspace-like appearance, then just get a cheap hosting plan with bluehost or some other place, set up a wordpress blog and use the podpress plug-in. Wordpress already supports feeds and Podpress will handle all the enclosure stuff for the feed. Wordpress and podpress are both free, and bluehost offers plans from $6.95 a month.
While I am extremely impressed by your ability to set up a home server, I think the category of nerd (not used in the derogatory fashion) that you are and the category of nerd of the question asker, are completely different.
Yes, taking a spare computer and setting up host is leet. It's pretty badass. But it's pretty obvious by the question itself that the poster is not capable of doing that. They have probably never compiled a line of code in their life, much less written a little routine to spit out an rss feed.
They may be inexperienced in that route, but the poster is smart enough to know that someone else has probably already created a simple solution to their problem and probably has a "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" web solution. I almost think that's even more elite. The poster gets what they want without writing a single line of code. How's that for a programming language.
I think that there should be room in slashdot for people who like and use technology without going under the hood too deeply, as well as the normal slashdot crowd of programmers, IT people, EEs, and pr0n hounds. I guess that's asking a little too much though.
postmodernsideshow.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know...I know not everyone likes godaddy...HOWEVER here is what I do.
.com and .net domains. .com so there are no ads, and host my mp3 files on the .net account.
.net site, but only for HTML/PHP etc files...mp3 files just download.
I registered a
With each domain you get the 5g storage, and 250gb of bandwidth for free with ads.
I pay for the
If you don't mind the ads, you can do free all the way.
There are ads on the
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
I suggest this neat little open source tool. It's a web-based frontend for managing podcasts -- just upload the files through a web interface and you're done (you may have to adjust the PHP max. filesize settings). What would be really lovely is a non-profit providing such a service on a reliable basis.
Anyway, I should have also mentioned that audio.module also includes audio_import.module, which can import mp3s you have uploaded by FTP, which should meet your criteria for that.
/admin section and configure the modules, and upload your mp3s. You get to maintain control over the whole process, rather than relying on someone else's service.
It should be pretty simple to setup. Buy hosting, untar the core package and modules, visit the
Software don't just celebrate 10 years of "existence"!
10 years of innovation, 10 years of creativity, 10 years of asskickery..but "existence"? Do you have nothing better to say?
That's like telling your wife..oh, never mind.
You guys would fail in the jungle that is today's market.
DreamHost offers 2 terabytes of transfer.
They don't enforce CPU minutes. If you use a lot, they may move you to an underused server. If you use a crazy amount, which is rare, they'll suggest a dedicated server.
As for killing processes, I find that if I 'nice' my long-running processes, they don't get killed.
1 TB for their basic $10/mo plan.
Oops, you're right, they changed it, I misread. It is 2 TB, as shown in the link.
I work at Calvary Chapel Chico, and recently the head Pastor here (Sam Allen) asked if I could start a Podcast for his daily radio show. I said "Sure", wow, that was premature. It took me a month of trying on my own, and then I found Pod-Serve.com. It works perfectly, and its still in alpha. It will automaticly list you on iTunes and Odeo (and itself). I'd recomend it to anyone.
For hosting your podcasts if you're a musician you might want to check out http://www.jamendo.com/
They do RSS, Podcasts, Bittorrent, reviews, etc... Pretty good, even if you just want to listen to some nice free music
Even though it is aimed at folks who want to do live shows, you can possibly get TalkShoe to upload files and they'll soon have a method to upload your own apparently. Don't know if it will be free to upload or not, though. People have obviously uploaded produced versions of their podcasts there, since you can tell those that weren't done over the phone (primarily how it is done there).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's that Wikipedia link you wanted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TANSTAAFL
Free is always bad. If you look at blogger help groups you will know how badly google has messed up Blogger.com and nothing is working and yet they continue to add users without giving any quality of service for existing users.
The "Podcast" is a mp3/ogg/whatever audio file, with an associated RSS feed.
If there's no RSS feed... guess what? It's JUST AN AUDIO FILE. I know, welcome to reality, hurts doesn't it?
Get off the buzzword bandwagon. Please. It just makes you look stupid.
Wowee, That's handy, there is an advert for it right underneath your post! Who would have thought!
God Be Gone
Dude, sounds like you need to check out the totally awesome and totally free http://www.rsspect.com/!! Plus Ryan North is one classy guy, so you know his stuff is gonna be good!
Box.net, free GB of space. WebDav support and RSS feeds of public folders.
I am not sure if it is free but BluBrry was talking about providing a hosting option. I am pretty sure it isn't available yet. If you contact them, they might be able to give you more information. Oh... and they DON'T automatically insert ads.
Mike http://thenextgenerationofradio.com
It's not too bad except for the limited file space:
http://www.ipodnetworks.com/
"I forgot my mantra."
Hey Just my 2c worth but it sounds like something the likes of Google are good at picking up on and doing. Im sure not even the swollowing of youtube would stretch the googleplex let alone something like this.
You could always host wherever you can get free bandwidth and space, then Create a RSS Feed at mysitefeed.com (use the advanced/custom feed at mysitefeed.com to create a feed, and a feed item that points to your mp3 file).
Libsyn (https://www.libsyn.com). Not exactly free ($5/month) but an outstanding value and highly reliable. Have been using them for almost 2 years.
That's nearly what I do. I use archive.org for free hosting of the MP3s (no hosting and bandwidth worries, pretty reliable service, open-ish source / creative commons licensed content preferred). The website itself is hosted cheaply elsewhere (and I don't need lots of space or bandwidth for that - one could even use a free service).
And I've been meaning to get around to hacking up something that can automate the generation of the RSS "podcast" feed which describes what has been uploaded. "RSS is simple" is close enough to true that a simple script could read in metadata (or let a user enter it) and produce the necessary rss feed file. Most of the required XML is just static text, really.
Or has someone written such a piece of code already?
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
I use www.blogplanet.ca and quite like it.
As the old adage goes. There are a few no-cost options (podshow, archive.org), but these take out of your hands to a certain degree your complete control over your podcast.
A year ago I searched around for cheap hosting - I didn't want to pay a fortune for hosting my files.
For $7-8 per month (US) you can get 20 gig storage, 300 gig per month transfer. Spend a little bit of money and keep "total" control over your podcast. Use FeedBurner to help take the pain out of RSS creation, or even go for the multitude of little aps out there that can generate your feed for you.
If your podcast ever gets even slightly popular the free options become incredibly unattractive, and you will be forced to move to something better. Best to start with the best option first.
http://podserve.biggu.com/user/login
fernand0 (without password, what can one do when your mail account disappeared?)