Podcast Directory & New-Episode Monitor

Unofficial. This Actor is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apple Inc. "Apple", "Apple Podcasts" and "iTunes" are trademarks of Apple Inc., used here only to describe the public data source this Actor reads. It is an independent tool that calls Apple's own public iTunes Search/Lookup API and each show's own public RSS feed.

Search the Apple Podcasts directory by term, genre or author and get back a clean show record — title, publisher, artwork, genre, episode count, and crucially the canonical RSS feed URL. Then, optionally, follow those feeds and emit new episodes.

What it is good for

• New-episode monitoring — schedule it daily against a watchlist and get one row per genuinely new episode. This is the recurring product; everything else is discovery.
• Podcast discovery / market mapping — who publishes in a genre, how many shows, how often.
• Feed resolution — turn a show name into an RSS URL you can consume anywhere.
• Guest and sponsor research — episode titles and descriptions across a set of shows.

Verified sample record, verbatim:

{"trackId":1200361736,"title":"The Daily","artist":"The New York Times",
 "feedUrl":"https://feeds.simplecast.com/Sl5CSM3S",
 "websiteUrl":"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736?uo=4"}

Input

newEpisodesOnly keeps last-seen episode GUIDs per show in the Actor's own key-value store. The first run has no baseline, emits everything, and logs that it did.

Output

Show rows:

podcastId, title, artist, description, feedUrl, websiteUrl, artworkUrl, genres[], episodeCount, country, contentRating, releaseDate, scrapedAt

Episode rows (when fetchEpisodes):

podcastId, podcastTitle, episodeGuid, episodeTitle, description, pubDate, duration, audioUrl, episodeUrl, isNew, scrapedAt

Responsible use

Public data only. Apple's public iTunes Search/Lookup endpoints plus each show's own public RSS feed — feeds that publishers deliberately publish for syndication. No account, no API key, no session cookie, no CAPTCHA solving, no headless browser, no proxy rotation.

No personal data. Show and episode metadata only — no listener data, no reviews, no accounts.

robots.txt, stated plainly. Checked live against itunes.apple.com/robots.txt: /lookup?id= is allowed; /search* is disallowed. podcastIds (the /lookup path) is therefore the preferred and robots-clean input for monitoring a fixed watchlist; searchTerms uses the search path and is rate-limited accordingly. RSS feeds are not covered by Apple's robots.txt at all — they sit on the publishers' own hosts, and the Actor honours each feed host's own robots.txt and any Retry-After it sends.

Feed etiquette. Polling other people's feeds carelessly is how a monitoring product becomes a nuisance. The Actor backs off on 429/403, respects Retry-After, and audio is never downloaded — only the audioUrl is emitted.

Your obligations as a user. This is a discovery and monitoring tool, not a redistribution pipeline. Do not mass-mirror feeds or audio.