Spreaker is a great platform for all podcasters, from beginners to the more advanced. We provide plenty of audio storage space (which, depending on your choice of plan, is either free, or very cheap), unlimited bandwidth, allow you complete control over your RSS feed, plus offer lots of useful tools that help you: broadcast live/podcast, automatically export to Youtube and Soundcloud, and much more.
There's a lot of confusion about what Spreaker can and cannot do for you out there on the Internet. We've drafted these FAQs to explicitly address all your questions.
We understand that, as a podcaster, you want full control over the files your listeners download.
In short, there is a simple way to make sure that your files are left untouched when you upload them to Spreaker, as long as you encode them with the following settings:
In this way, Spreaker will not modify any file you upload, and you can be sure that it will be consumed exactly the way you submitted it, including all its metadata and ID3 information.
In order to better understand why we must sometimes make modifications to your files, you need to remember that Spreaker's audience mainly relies on streaming (i.e. people consuming content without downloading it first), and this is particularly true for live content.
Because of this, we need all our media files to be encoded in the same format; we've chosen the specs above because we believe they give the best trade-off between audio quality and bandwidth requirements.
So if your podcast is encoded in a different format, we need to transcode it first for optimal streaming. It is during this transcoding process that some metadata could be lost.
Spreaker gives you a number of different RSS feeds that are iTunes compatible, as well as customizable. You have:
For free users, some basic customization is possible. The feed will automatically use Spreaker's metadata (i.e. show artwork, description, episode titles, and so on). PRO users can more thoroughly customize their feed by editing all the information that will eventually be used on iTunes.
You can find the the RSS feed link for your account by going to your Profile page and clicking on the Episodes tab. Then, right click on Subscribe to RSS Feed and copy the link.
You can find the the RSS feed link for your show by going to your show's page, and finding the orange RSS icon towards the top (you'll notice it has wave symbols). Right click on the icon and and copy the link.
Spreaker gives you the ability to use an existing RSS feed to populate your account.
The system downloads all the episodes listed in the feed and creates a local copy in Spreaker's storage. If the source files are encoded with the settings specified above, they are not modified. Otherwise they are converted to mp3, 44.1, 128kbps CBR, stereo.
It is also possible to sync the Spreaker inlet with the RSS feed's content, so that Spreaker can periodically download newly available episodes.
Please note that the RSS ingestion feature is primarily meant as an easy way to transfer existing content to Spreaker, but it can also be effectively used as an additional distribution option for your podcast.
Some other hosting sites promote packages that give you X amount of megabytes available for uploading your content, that resets at the beginning of each month.
We've chosen a much simpler approach.
We charge you for the total amount of storage available to you; and since all the audio on our platform is encoded at the same bitrate, we can talk about time (i.e. hours of storage), instead of Megabytes or Gigabytes.
Just as a reference, 100MB of data is equivalent to 1 hour and 40 minutes of audio at 128kbps.
So, if you buy a rolling 100MB upload/month plan, it would take you 58 months (almost 5 years) before filling up the 100 hours of storage available on our On-Air-Talent plan ($59/year).
Of course, you could get better use of this storage by using lower bitrates (64kbps or 96kbps for instance), but the savings would be negligible, and there would be a noticeable difference in audio quality.
Yes, you can.
Just import the RSS feed of your podcast using the RSS feed importer and keep it in sync with the source.
Please note that the episodes will be copied to Spreaker's servers in order to make streaming possible. This means that:
Please see: How to submit your program to the Apple iTunes store and become an iTunes podcast
The short answer is: if you have a lot of content, it makes sense to.
A branded mobile application gives you yet another touchpoint with your audience. It makes it easier for them to access your content directly, and listeners usually want to access more than one piece of content from a single app.
Another advantage of having your own app is discoverability: you can publish the app on the app store and include keywords that best represent your show in the title and description.
As more and more users access the internet mobile first, having your presence on the app store is equivalent to having your own website.