Podcast Episode Scraper (RSS & Apple)

Extract the full episode list of any podcast — from a direct RSS feed or an Apple Podcasts link — with no API key. Get one clean row per episode with title, publish date, duration, audio URL, transcript link, season/episode numbers, and cover art.

What you get

• Podcast title and author for every episode row
• Episode title, publish date, and duration (normalized to seconds)
• Audio URL and MIME type — the direct media enclosure
• Transcript URL — when the feed publishes a <podcast:transcript> tag
• Season and episode numbers (where tagged)
• Explicit flag, episode web page link, and GUID
• Cover art image and a clean plain-text description

Use cases

• Podcast analytics & catalog building — pull an entire show's back catalog into a spreadsheet
• Content research — track release cadence, episode lengths, and guest cadence across shows
• Transcript pipelines — collect audio + transcript URLs to feed downstream processing
• Media monitoring — watch a set of shows and capture new episodes as they publish
• Dataset creation — build podcast datasets for search, recommendation, or ML

How to use

1. Add one or more feeds. Each can be:
   • a direct RSS feed URL — https://feeds.megaphone.fm/your-show
   • an Apple Podcasts URL — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/name/id1234567890
   • an apple:<id> shortcut — apple:1234567890
2. Optionally set Max Episodes Per Feed and/or a total Max Items cap
3. Run the actor — results land in the Dataset tab
4. Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets directly from the Apify console

Example input

{
  "feeds": [
    "https://feeds.simplecast.com/54nAGcIl",
    "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736"
  ],
  "maxEpisodesPerFeed": 50,
  "maxItems": 0
}

Output format

One dataset record per episode:

{
  "podcastTitle": "The Example Show",
  "podcastAuthor": "Example Media",
  "feedUrl": "https://feeds.simplecast.com/54nAGcIl",
  "episodeTitle": "Episode 42: A Great Conversation",
  "pubDate": "Wed, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 -0000",
  "durationSeconds": 3120,
  "season": 2,
  "episode": 42,
  "explicit": false,
  "audioUrl": "https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/.../episode.mp3",
  "audioType": "audio/mpeg",
  "episodeUrl": "https://example.com/episodes/42",
  "guid": "abcd-1234",
  "transcriptUrl": "https://example.com/episodes/42/transcript.vtt",
  "imageUrl": "https://image.simplecastcdn.com/.../cover.jpg",
  "description": "In this episode we talk about ..."
}

Notes

• Apple Podcasts links are resolved to the show's underlying RSS feed automatically via the public iTunes lookup — Apple does not host the audio itself, the RSS feed does.
• Episodes are read in feed order (newest first for most shows); Max Episodes Per Feed keeps that many from the top.
• transcriptUrl is only present when the publisher includes a transcript tag in the feed.