UPDATE: Yahoo! has shut down Pipes, which was key to this process. Thus, this method will no longer work. Please subscribe to the blog, podcast, and email newsletter for future updates on a new method.
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I don't recommend SoundCloud as the primary home for your podcast, but it's a good additional distribution channel. Here's how to automatically publish your podcast episodes from your podcast RSS feed to your SoundCloud account, using Yahoo! Pipes and If This Then That (IFTTT).
1. Run your podcast RSS through Yahoo! Pipes
Visit the Yahoo! Pipe I created for you and enter your podcast's title, website, and podcast-only RSS URL. Click Run Pipe. Then, right-click on “Get as RSS” and copy the target URL.
Optionally clone the pipe into your own Yahoo! account for advanced editing and control.
2. Connect Yahoo! Pipes and SoundCloud with IFTTT
Create or login to an If This Then That (IFTTT) account and visit the IFTTT recipe I created for you. You may need to activate the SoundCloud channel.
Replace the RSS URL in the first field with the feed URL you copied from Yahoo! Pipes.
You could click “Add Recipe” right now, or customize the fields, especially the tags field to include any global tags that apply to every episode of your podcast.
When you're finished, click “Add Recipe.”
3. Publish and wait
The process is now setup! Just publish new podcast episodes and they will automatically publish to SoundCloud from this time forward. (Old episodes won't be published for you.)
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That sounds awesome!
I only have a free SoundCloud account, what happens when I hit the upload quota? Does it stop working, or are old items deleted?
I’m not exactly sure on that, but I think the old items get deleted.
That would be cool. I’m gonna have to check to see if there’s anything I don’t mind loosing and I’ll probably implement this. I’ll reply here with my findings, but it might be a couple days before I have the chance.
Not sure if you discovered the answer for yourself, but what happens is that your old episodes are disabled, but they are not deleted. If you were to purchase an unlimited account, for example, you could bring them back with all the same details.
Do you know why you have to go through Yahoo Pipes? Why won’t a Libsyn RSS feed work?
A straight podcast RSS feed from anyone won’t work directly because IFTTT doesn’t offer the enclosure URL. My Pipe also does more cool things, like append the link, pull your tags, and more.
Cool, I’ll give it a spin. I’ve heard you can do something similar using Spreaker.
Just put this into effect. We’ll find out on Monday morning if it picked up the new RSS feed!
Here’s a question, though, what happens if Yahoo Pipes goes bye-bye? It seems to pop up every now and again, but looks like the product itself hasn’t been updated since 1999.
If that happens, I’ll probably figure out a PHP/WordPress way to do this.
Which will go first: Yahoo! Pipes or Google FeedBurner? 😛
Looks like it worked! (screenshot attached). The only things to note are that by default the file is not available for download, it will use your Profile avatar rather than the feeds cover artwork, and descriptions from Libsyn which may have HTML can’t be displayed. In my case, I copy-paste the WordPress description into Libsyn so that if someone has the Podcasts mobile app, they can have the links be actual links, but SoundCloud doesn’t like this.
I’m going to make a 3-minute stop into SoundCloud part of the episode post-release workflow. We’ll see how it all goes!
Thanks for the tip.
Forgot the screenshot
Yes, those are some of the caveats I mentioned. The description issue is something I may be able to tweak in Yahoo! Pipes. It’s tricky because iTunes pulls that description from a list of potential tags in RSS. I made my pipe pull from the , but I’ll see about putting in some conditional logic.
This has to be the best news I’ve heard this week! Thank you so much, Daniel!
Thanks and you’re welcome!
Could this system possibility be modified to work for other audio podcasting platforms such as audiboo , spreaker, and mixler ?
Not really. Those platforms either don’t have an API for IFTTT, or they already provide RSS imports. Spreaker, for example, already allows you to import your podcast automatically from its RSS feed. Audioboom can, too, but you have to contact them to set it up. Mixlr, however, doesn’t have any such option. But I do believe you can stilll connect Mixlr to a SoundCloud playlist for 24/7 streaming.
FYI, I had some problems this morning with the latest episode. It worked twice, but somewhere this workflow seems to have stopped. I can’t tell if it’s IFTTT or Pipes or SoundCloud, but I’m going to handle it manually today and see what happens next week.
Another episode failed to publish. Anyone else had trouble with this?
I’ve seen some mixed reports of that, but I can’t figure out why it’s happening. Would you post the exact RSS feed and which episode messed up?
Podcast feed: http://busycreator.libsyn.com/rss ; website URL: http://busycreator.com/ ; result from Pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=990c3fb08f57e4d0487339e4d6e172ac&_render=rss&podcast_rss=http%3A%2F%2Fbusycreator.libsyn.com%2Frss&title=The+Busy+Creator+Podcast+with+Prescott+Perez-Fox&website=http%3A%2F%2Fbusycreator.com
Episodes 48 and 49 worked fine, but 50 failed to update so I did the procedure again. 50 and now 51 are no-shows.
We have a service that does exactly what you guys are wanting to do and more. Once you setup your account you simply drag your podcast episode (with metadata embeded) to a dropbox folder that we monitor and we automatically send it to SoundCloud, Youtube, Vimeo, DailyMotion using the title, description and tags embeded in the mp3. We can even automatically tweet a message with a link to your media file hosted at any or all of these sites. Once you do the initial setup, you’ll only need to drag and drop to distribute your episodes to all your channels. You can signup free at http://Firepype.com. Hopefully you guys might find this helpful.
Daniel – I tried 2 weeks in a row – and it didn’t work – can I hire ya to get it working for me? theboys@theSDRshow.com
Thank you so much for this video! It really helped me out! Thank you.
http://www.reynalay.com
Now that SoundCloud offers an RSS feed for podcasts and unlimited hosting for $15 a month, do you still not recommend SoundCloud as a hosting solution?
Yes, I still don’t recommend SoundCloud has a hosting solution.
Can you direct me to a post about why you don’t recommend it… or offer a brief explanation here?
Here’s the short of it. SoundCloud is a very inferior platform. Their stats aren’t good, their RSS feed is missing several important controls.
But worst of all is that SoundCloud is more interested in having you promote them than they are interested in your building your own brand.
Thank you both very much for taking the time and offering such helpful replies.
Since the time I had originally posted my question, I had run my podcast from SoundCloud for about 14 recordings and then switched to Blubrry. What follows is why.
Initially, I thought it would be easiest and more cost effective to host the on SoundCloud. It worked well for a little while, but I began to notice some features lacking from SoundCloud, and it seemed that its developers had a strange sense of priorities when it came to hosting podcasts. For example, they refuse to reenable HTML formatting of show notes (even through markdown) and the editable published field does nothing as the published date is determined by the actual upload date on the server. (Seriously, SoundCloud?) Forget about scheduled publishing. Oh, and they also decided to remove the embedded player from Facebook posts and instead link to their site, citing user experience as the reason and no plans to revert that decision.
There are also rumors of SoundCloud facing some issues with generating revenue and funding as well as legal issues with the major music labels, ads being inserted in the service, and a subscription model coming up for listeners. As a result, I began to have concerns about hosting on SoundCloud because the service in general seems to be having an identity crisis. Are they trying to be a community for musicians? A podcasting platform? A music subscription service? The “YouTube of audio” regardless of content type?
It seems SoundCloud wants to do too many things with mediocrity rather than be really good at one or two things. As a result, all of its users suffers.
Oh, yeah. They also rename your files.
Great feedback, Kristian! I really appreciate your sharing it!
Sure. I plan to keep my eye on SoundCloud in case they figure things out, but I’m skeptical.
I’m getting an error that the audio file size is too big, what is the file size limit? Thanks!
Looks like Yahoo! Pipes went before Feedburner. Are you working on another solution for this automation? I wish IFTTT supported an ingredient for files in the enclosure tag!
Yes, I’m trying to figure out a replacement.
Did you ever find a replacement?
Not yet. Performance on SoundCloud is so horrible, fixing this workflow is near the bottom of my priorities. I also have big doubts that SoundCloud will be around in a year or two.
https://www.pipes.digital/
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