Podcast Metadata — Shows & Episodes (No Transcription)

Apple Podcasts / iTunes Search & Lookup plus RSS episode metadata — without downloading audio or running Whisper.

Give this Actor search keywords, Apple podcast/collection IDs, and/or feed URLs. It returns show rows (title, artist, feedUrl, genres, artwork, trackCount) and optional episode rows (guid, title, published, duration, enclosureUrl, showNotesHash). No transcription. No audio download. No email or contact fields. Failed lookups and empty/broken feeds are free by default. Default memory: 256 MB.

Chain to RSS & Atom to Markdown when you want show notes / entry bodies as Markdown after you have the feed URL and episode list.

What you get

• Show list from iTunes Search, iTunes Lookup, and/or direct feed URLs
• Optional episode list from each show’s RSS (enclosureUrl is metadata only)
• Fields: title, artist, feedUrl, genres, country, trackCount, artwork, duration, showNotesHash
• Hard exclusions: no Whisper / speech-to-text, no audio bytes stored, no host emails / guest booking contacts
• Failed / empty feeds free (unless you opt into chargeFailedShows)
• Default 256 MB; httpx + feedparser only

Measured results

Cloud benches on build 0.1.2, 256 MB (Asia/Taipei 2026-10-02):

Run	Input	Result	Peak RSS	Platform cost
smoke	search+lookup → 4 shows / 9 eps	ok	119 MB	~$0.00031
bench	4 shows / 20 eps	ok	107 MB	~$0.00038
search-only	5 shows, no episodes	ok	~80–100 MB	~$0.00027
empty feed	404 URL	free error	~77 MB	~$0.00008

See docs/PRICING.md for margin math.

Use cases

• Agent / RAG pipelines that need podcast catalog metadata without transcription cost
• Discover shows by keyword, then pass feedUrl into rss-atom-to-markdown for show-notes Markdown
• Enrich known Apple collection IDs with genres, artwork, and recent episode URLs (enclosure links only)

How to use

{
  "searchKeywords": ["rachel maddow"],
  "podcastIds": ["1211780212"],
  "feedUrls": [{ "url": "https://feeds.simplecast.com/54nAGcIl" }],
  "country": "us",
  "includeEpisodes": true,
  "maxShows": 10,
  "maxEpisodesPerShow": 20
}

Example show row:

{
  "kind": "show",
  "status": "success",
  "source": "itunes-search",
  "collectionId": "1211780212",
  "title": "The Indicator from Planet Money",
  "artist": "NPR",
  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.simplecast.com/...",
  "genres": ["Business", "News"],
  "country": "USA",
  "trackCount": 1200,
  "artworkUrl": "https://..."
}

Example episode row:

{
  "kind": "episode",
  "status": "success",
  "guid": "...",
  "title": "Episode title",
  "showTitle": "The Indicator from Planet Money",
  "feedUrl": "https://...",
  "published": "2026-09-30T12:00:00+00:00",
  "duration": "00:09:12",
  "durationSecs": 552,
  "enclosureUrl": "https://.../episode.mp3",
  "showNotesHash": "sha256..."
}

Pricing (PPE)

Event	Price	Notes
Actor start	$0.001	Synthetic start (per GB memory, 1 GB min)
podcast-show	$0.001	Primary — successful show metadata
podcast-episode	$0.0005	Successful episode metadata row

Failed / empty feeds are free. Tune after benches (docs/PRICING.md).

Input highlights

Field	Role
searchKeywords	iTunes Search (media=podcast)
podcastIds	Apple collection IDs or podcasts.apple.com /id… URLs
feedUrls	Direct RSS/Atom feeds
includeEpisodes	Parse feeds for episode rows (default true)
maxShows / maxEpisodesPerShow	Caps
country	iTunes store country (default us)

Related Actors

• RSS & Atom to Markdown — JSON + RAG Chunks — metadata → notes MD: use show feedUrl / episode links here, then convert entry bodies to Markdown there.
• Sitemap URL Extractor — discover document URLs on the open web.
• SEO Metadata Extract — OG / JSON-LD from live pages.

What this Actor does not do

• No transcription (no Whisper, no speech-to-text, no captions as a product)
• No audio download (enclosure URLs are listed; bytes are never fetched for media)
• No email / contacts / guest-booking lead scrapes
• Not a replacement for full-text show-notes Markdown pipelines — use rss-atom-to-markdown for that

License & source code

This Actor is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0) — see LICENSE. Runtime stack: httpx (BSD-3-Clause), feedparser (BSD-2-Clause), Apify SDK. The full source code is public: https://github.com/xbox002000/podcast-metadata