The Auphonic Podcast Publishing Pipeline
In the podcasting world Auphonic is a service widely used for post-processing the recordings.
Yet the publishing part is often done via wordpress plugins, and other quirky software.
The used systems often mix the RSS-Feed with a website, thinking that either the feed or the website should come first and the other is an "upgrade" on top of them.
And usually you have to somehow manually craft every new Podcast Episode into a new post or something.
Some of those systems already use auphonic processing data as a kind of DB or at least as an input. That's a good step. Our source of truth for the metadata should be the data we give auphonic! This is because it will also be in the metadata of our audio files, so a change after we give it to auphonic would mean we'd have to check and fix every output file which is tedious.
But, but, doesn't that mean, that all the data is already there before we process our podcasts and we could have a "hook", that just publishes them to any point we want as soon as Auphonic is ready?
Exactly!
But neither the feed nor a blog software is a good point to keep all the information about our podcasts. That's where the Phipeline comes into play.
You create a Podcast in the phipeline DB and connect it (based on a web hook) to a Auphonic preset, which is possible thanks to the Auphonic API. After that, every new Production based on this preset will automagically be added to this Podcast and stored in Phipeline's DB.
Now you can have different Publishing Pipeline Steps to generate a feed, build a website, or just copy the DB content somewhere. This can also include a message on Twitter with the link to the new episode. But the important part is that every publishing output can be, but does not have to be dependent on other publishing outputs. Why should my RSS-feed be in any way related to the frontend of my choice? Why should it even be on the same server as the website? Why don't we put it for example on the CDN we use for our audio files, as a static document?
So that's my goal, let's code.