This page refers to the more ‘content’ and ‘data’ kind of information: videos, podcasts, music & more. For ‘academic knowledge’ (books & articles) check out freeing-knowledge.
DO NOT ASSUME ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET WILL REMAIN THERE.
https://rentry.org/firehawk52 https://champagne.pages.dev/ https://fmhy.net/beginners-guide https://ripped.guide/ https://ori5000.github.io/musicripping.html
Spotify is largely an interface for podcasts which use the RSS format.
This causes issues for accessing old podcast content, because RSS feeds aren’t designed to go back far in time, instead being a location for listing the most recent episodes or posts in a feed.
As of today (19th June 2024) the RNZ Checkpoint Podcast rss feed returns an the earliest episode as:
<pubDate>Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:46:00 +1300</pubDate>
<itunes:title>Oppenheimer claims best picture trophy at the Academy Awards</itunes:title>
while the earliest I could find by searching through the RNZ webpage was an episode from May 2007. At time of searching, it was on the 3001st page.
In comparison, the Spotify API when requesting the episodes for RNZ checkpoint responded that there were "total": 1000, episodes. Requesting the 1000th episode reveals that it is "href": "https://api.spotify.com/v1/episodes/5DiGRXupHLBU2KpMfIwELL", "name": "Oppenheimer claims best picture trophy at the Academy Awards", "release_date": "2024-03-11", The same as the RSS feed!
So, Spotify doesn’t show you all the episodes of a podcast, only the ones in the current RSS feed. This makes sense, as it provides a single source of truth for the show, meaning the creator can remove it from the RSS feed and it will probably come off of all platforms that people use to listen to it. This means that the content is likely not being stored on Spotify servers, instead accessing old podcast episodes requires finding an archive of the files (and hopefully the metadata).
Please let me know if there is another way you are aware of!
Searching through Spotify’s network requests when playing the Oppenheimer Episode reveals that the audio comes from https://flex.acast.com/podcast.radionz.co.nz/ckpt/ckpt-20240311-1646-oppenheimer_claims_best_picture_trophy_at_the_academy_awards-128.mp3 which redirects to https://stitcher2.acast.com/livestitches/ba76f3080777b5c6033e5eb0a03365f3.mp3?aid=[apparent authentication parameters]
However, it is apparent the url after flex.acast.com/ works by itself: podcast.radionz.co.nz/ckpt/ckpt-20240311-1646-oppenheimer_claims_best_picture_trophy_at_the_academy_awards-128.mp3
I think this confirms that Spotify isn’t storing or hosting the podcast audio files, however, they do seem to host 60s previews.
https://podz-content.spotifycdn.com/audio/clips/7xYyZqKhhwlM0jYlEnTw2x/clip_0_60000.mp3 is the preview of the Oppenheimer episode. It will be interesting to see if Spotify continues to host the preview as the episode slides off the end of the RSS feed.
The Spotify original podcast The Big Picture has a public RSS feed and is therefore available on other podcasting platforms. However the audio files come from Spotify’s podcasing platform Megaphone. Apple podcasts serves up https://traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT9379274207.mp3 which redirects to https://dcs.megaphone.fm/GLT9379274207.mp3 with some event id stuff in the queryparams that isn’t needed to access the file.