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Last month, we looked at publishing your Blog with a Feed via feedburner that will push the audio to peoples pod catchers on their PCs and mobile devices. This month, we are going to look at hosting for your audio files – if you are not signed up to a podcasting service that provides hosting and you are not able to set up your own hosting either from a cloud based server provider or a self hosted server.
HPR, mintCast (of which I am a co-host), and Distrohoppers Digest (which I set up with Moss – another mintCast co-host) use the services of Archive.org – which is a not-for-profit foundation set up to save the history of the internet by saving internet content so it can be used by future generations, a library of digital content.
As well as accessing the resources already hosted on their servers, you can create an account and upload your own content. For this article, I am referring to content to which you have legal entitlement – as either the creator and copyright holder, or content that has a community licence such as the ‘Creative Commons’ licence – so uploading the ‘Full Circle’ archive as it is produced under a CC licence, is perfectly legitimate as long as you adhere to the licence terms.
So, as we are not making any financial gain from Distrohoppers, we were looking at sustainable ways of hosting the audio in a way that would still be available, if we, at some point in the future, lay the podcast down. Signing up for an account is very easy, you provide an email address and password and you are good to go.
So, once you have created your account login with your email and password, you are ready to start uploading audio to the site. If you look at the top right of the Archive.org screen between your name and the search area it says upload.
Press this, and you will be redirected to the file upload page where you can drag and drop files, or search for them on your PC to upload.
Once you select the files you wish to upload, you are shown a screen to assign a title to the upload and tag the file with information relating to the content. The page title will have the filename in it, but this can be changed; in my case I put the title of the show and episode number in this box. Further down you get to choose the licence for the content, we use Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International, but other choices are available. After you have completed this, then you can proceed to upload the files you have chosen. Depending on the size of the file(s), this can take some time, but once completed, a page for that content is created on the server showing all the files you have uploaded to the page. On the right-hand-side of this page is the list of files you have uploaded, and if you open the file you wish to share through your feed, and this is an audio file, there will be a player which starts to play the audio as soon as the audio loads. Stop this while you copy the URL from the address bar at the top of your browser.
This is the URL you need to put into your Blog post for the episode you are wishing to feed to people’s podcatchers; without this link in your blog, feedburner has nothing to link to on the page. On the page I create, I put the links in the text that says the name of the episode and either .mp3 or .OGG.
Picture 008 - Link audio to Blog.jpg
So this article has covered one way of hosting your podcast audio. As I said at the start, it is not the only way but it is one way that many in the podcast world have chosen to use. It does have its downsides as you are reliant on the Archive.org servers being up and working, but, in the time I have been using the service, this has never been an issue. For Creative Commons content, this is a very good solution to how to host your content. I also upload a .flac file of the audio so that I always have a good quality backup of the show audio if my personal backups were to fail.
So far, we have looked at everything from the hardware and software needed to create your audio, how to create a Blog to publish the content and provide an RSS feed to get the audio to people’s podcatchers, and how to host your audio content using the services of Archive.org. In the next couple of articles, I will look at the process we follow on mintCast and Distrohoppers to record the audio and what we do in post production editing when there are multiple audio tracks.
If you wish to contact me for more information, you can get me at: distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com or th@mintcast.org