Making a private podcast feed of your own recordings

A podcast app is a good place to listen to more than podcasts: voice notes, recorded talks, lectures, or articles turned into speech, with the app remembering where you stopped and downloading new episodes for the journey. All it needs is the sound files on a web server and a feed, a small RSS file listing them, which the app checks for new episodes. These tools get the episodes ready and write the feed; you need somewhere to put the files, such as your own website or a storage service that gives each file a public address.

1. Trim each episode

Open each recording in the Audio Trimmer and move Start and End to cut silence or false starts at either end, adding a short Fade in and Fade out if it starts or ends abruptly. Save as WAV so the next step works on full quality.

2. Make the episodes the same loudness

Open each trimmed episode in the Loudness Meter and pick one Target for all of them, so you don’t have to change the volume between episodes: −16 (podcasts, Apple), or −19 (mono podcasts) for speech recorded in mono. Then Save at this loudness as MP3, which every podcast app plays, or AAC .m4a, which is smaller for the same quality and plays in most.

3. Name and check each file

The feed builder names each episode from the file’s Title tag, or from its file name when there’s none, and files saved by the Loudness Meter carry no tags. So give each file the name you’d like to see in the app, such as 2026-10-14 Notes on the move.mp3; you can still change any title in the feed builder.

Open a finished file or two in Audio Tags to check them before uploading: the first table shows the format, length and sample rate, and Tags shows whether a title is there.

4. Upload the files and write the feed

Upload the episodes to one folder on your web space and note its address, such as https://example.com/podcast/audio/. Open the Podcast Feed Builder, fill in the podcast’s Title, Description and a Cover picture address (a square picture, uploaded beside the episodes), and put the folder’s address in Where the sound files will be. Then drop the same files on Sound files to add as episodes: each becomes an episode with its address, size, type and length filled in, and nothing is uploaded from here. Add a description to each if you like, and Save feed.xml.

The message lists anything an app may refuse, such as a missing address or cover picture. Upload feed.xml to the same web space; its address, such as https://example.com/podcast/feed.xml, is your podcast.

5. Follow it, and add episodes later

In your podcast app, add the show by its feed address. Most apps can: Apple Podcasts has Follow a Show by URL in its menus, and others call it something like Add by URL. New episodes appear when the app next checks the feed.

To add an episode, open your saved feed.xml with Open a feed to edit, drop the new file on the episodes box, save, and upload the new feed.xml over the old one. Keep each file’s address the same once it’s in the feed: apps tell episodes apart by it, so a moved file shows up as a new episode.

A feed address that isn’t linked from anywhere is hard to find, but it isn’t secret: anyone who has it can listen. Don’t put anything in a private feed you wouldn’t want found.