Unlike other recording services, AutoPod does not use a recorder for the direct creation of episodes.
Instead, we have seperated the recording and episode generation process into two distinct functions.
INFO
Recorders are always running in the background and the full station output is kept for 60 days which means that episode creation is not at risk of missing the start time or simply not starting the recording.
Episodes are created by taking a copy of the full stream recording between the start and end times of the episode, converting to a standard MP3 format that will be accepted across a wide range of devices and platforms and uploaded to our preferred cloud storage provider.
The below image shows (in a very basic sense) how this works. The full stream recording is stored as a series of 10 second segments for the previous 60 days. An episode generator then takes the segments and creates the final MP3 file
Only completed episodes are available to the public. The full stream recording is only ever accessible by the episode creation process. If you need to access content from the past then it must always be accessed by first creating an episode. We do not allow direct access to the full stream recording so that we can ensure the integrity of the recording and guarantee that it has not been tampered with.
INFO
If you need to create an episode but forgot to add to the schedule, AutoPod is able to do this by accessing the back catalogue of recordings. In this sense AutoPod is similar to a station output logger / record of transmission.
