Podcasts, unfortunately, disappear off the Internet quite often. The smaller the podcast, the more likely this is. Fortunately, we can do something to prevent this.
I have a very simple system for archiving podcasts that anyone can easily replicate:
- Search on archive.org to see if the podcast has already been saved there.
- Paste the podcast’s RSS feed into the free, open source Windows app Podcast Bulk Downloader: https://github.com/cnovel/PodcastBulkDownloader/releases (For Mac and Linux, you can use gPodder: https://gpodder.github.io/)
- Make sure to select “Date prefix” in Podcast Bulk Downloader before downloading. This puts the episode release date in YYYY-MM-DD format at the beginning of the file name, which is important if you want to listen to the episodes in chronological order. Then hit “Download”. (In gPodder, go to Preferences → Extensions → check “Rename episodes after download” → Click “Edit config” → Check “extensions.rename_download.add_sortdate”.)
- Create an account on archive.org with an email address you don’t care about and upload the files there. (It’s bewildering, but your email address is publicly revealed when you upload any file to archive.org and they do not ever warn you about this. Firefox Relay is a good tool for this: https://relay.firefox.com/) Include a jpeg or png file (preferably, jpeg because it displays better on archive.org) of the album art in your upload and it will automatically become the thumbnail for your upload.
That’s it! You’re done!