SMF·TRANSISTOR-FM
Can a prompt replace Transistor?
Audio & video editing — podcast recording, cleanup and publishing
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Generating a valid podcast RSS feed and putting MP3s behind it is genuinely a few hours' work. Everything else about podcast hosting is infrastructure and measurement. Downloads have to be counted the way the industry agreed to count them, which means server-side deduplication rules most people have never read, and a feed that goes down or changes its URL takes your show off every directory at once. That is what the subscription buys, and no amount of code substitutes for it.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a self-hosted podcast publishing service. The deliverable is a correct RSS feed and honest download numbers, not an audio editor.
Shows and episodes: a show carries a title, description, author, owner email, artwork, language, category, and an explicit flag. An episode carries a title, description, publication date, episode and season numbers, episode type (full, trailer, bonus), duration, an audio file, and optional chapters and a transcript.
Feed generation, which has to be exactly right. Emit RSS 2.0 with the iTunes and Podcast Namespace extensions. Include a stable GUID per episode that never changes, correct enclosure length in bytes and MIME type, itunes:duration, itunes:image, itunes:explicit, and a podcast:transcript element where a transcript exists. Validate the feed against a podcast feed validator as part of the test suite — a feed that fails validation is silently rejected by directories rather than reported.
Media delivery: store audio in S3-compatible storage and serve it through your own domain via a redirect or proxy, so every request passes through code you control. Support HTTP range requests, because podcast apps use them and a server that ignores them breaks scrubbing.
Download counting, done to the published standard rather than by counting requests. Count a download when a single client, identified by IP and user agent, requests at least one contiguous megabyte of the file within a 24-hour window, and count it once per client per episode per day. Discard requests from a maintained bot user-agent list. Show the raw request count alongside the deduplicated count so the difference is visible. State clearly in the README that this implements the IAB rules in outline and is not a certified measurement — an uncertified number is not one an advertiser will accept.
Analytics: downloads per episode over time, listener client and country from the request log, and a 7-day and 30-day figure per episode, which is how podcast performance is actually compared.
Safety rails: refuse to change an episode GUID after publication, warn loudly before changing the feed URL, and keep a published-feed archive so any past state can be reproduced.
Out of scope: audio editing or mastering, dynamic ad insertion, private subscriber feeds, hosted transcription, and directory submission (which is a manual one-time step per platform — document it).Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 download counting that podcast advertisers will accept
- B.2 bandwidth at podcast scale, and the bill that comes with it
- B.3 the private-feed and dynamic ad-insertion machinery
- B.4 someone else guaranteeing the feed URL never breaks
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: audio infrastructure, distribution, and production polish
Because a podcast feed is a permanent public contract with Apple, Spotify and every app in between. Break it and you lose subscribers who will never notice they are gone.
Questions
Can I move an existing show off Transistor?
Yes, and this is the one migration that has a correct procedure. Download every episode, rebuild the feed with the same GUIDs, then set a 301 redirect on the old feed URL to the new one and leave it in place for months. Skip the redirect and every subscriber silently stops receiving episodes.
What does bandwidth actually cost?
This is the number that decides the whole question. A 50 MB episode with 1,000 downloads is 50 GB of egress. On a cloud provider charging by the gigabyte that is meaningful; on a VPS with generous included transfer it is nothing. Price your egress before assuming self-hosting is cheaper.
Will my download numbers match Transistor's?
Close, but not identical, and they should not be trusted for a sponsorship without saying where they came from. The deduplication rules matter more than the raw count, which is why the prompt implements them explicitly and shows both figures side by side.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Never thinking about the feed again. Transistor's job is that the RSS stays up, the GUIDs stay stable and Apple never drops the show. Yours is up until the day the certificate expires, and podcast apps do not tell your listeners why the episodes stopped.
Related tools
Receipt