A Podcast feed is a document that lists the episodes in a given podcast. Each entry in the feed has a title, a date, and an ddress for the audio file.
Replay makes a few tweaks to a podcast feed, to change the dates so that the first few episodes can be heard instantly, with subsequent episodes delivered in the original cadence.
That means if you rewind a daily podcast, you’ll get an archived episode every day, starting from episode one. If you rewind a wekly podcast, you’ll get each episode in order, week by week.
We use today’s date as the new starting point for episdoe one, and actually fast-forward a couple of weeks from that point, so you’ll get the first two episodes (or more if the show is more frequent). That way you can evaluate the podcast over a few episodes before deciding to stick with it or not.
Who made this and why
I made this! Hi, I’m Mark Steadman. I run a company called Origin. I provide support for podcasters and the podcast industry.
I built Replay to keep my coding muscles toned, and because it’s the sort of obscure-but-useful tool I like to see exist in the world.
Points of order
-
Rewind does not alter the original feed (there’s no way for it to do that). It doesn’t re-host any media, so if you’re a podcaster, your stats will show normal listening activity.
-
The tool doesn’t rewrite the feed completely; it just changes a few things. An
<itunes:block>tag is added so that the feed can’t be indexed by Apple Podcasts, and email addresses are removed from the<itunes:owner>and<managingEditor>tags where possible. -
There are no user accounts and no statistics being gathered about subscribers or feed owners. There isn’t much of a database powering it, either. I list the feeds that have been rewound and the date the feed was requested, but no user activity is logged at all.
-
If you have any questions or concerns (or if, for some reason you want to block a feed from being rewound), you can email mark@origin.fm.