AutoPod leverages cloud based providers for the safe storage of your media. We have opted for a system that gives us a high level of reliability whilst providing a level of flexibility that would otherwise not have been possible.
We store two different types of content and whilst both are stored in similar ways, there are key differences and optimisations between the two.
The claimed level of data protection and recovery for our prefered storage provider is 99.999999999% data resilience. Overall we have found this system to work exceptionally well and whilst it is a more expensive option, as broadcast engineers for us the key concern is reliability.
Episodes
Episodes are the completed MP3 files that are available to the public. There is one file per episode and we keep these episodes for as long as the AutoPod plan that you have opted for allows (e.g. AutoPod 14 means that the public episodes are stored for 14 days)
We have to transcode these files to mp3 to preserve compatibility with external podcast aggregation apps. We do not purposefully change the quality however if your stream happened to be in a format such as FLAC there would be a small difference in quality as part of the transcode process. 99% of streams utilise MP3 or AAC codecs though and means that the episodes created and stored retain their original quality (in other words, they are 'as broadcast')
Station Output Log (ROT)
The key differentiation between AutoPod and other recorders of a similar nature (we believe) is the fact that we also keep a full 60 day backup of the station output. As a result, AutoPod can also be used as a full backup recording of your station output.
This backup is not publicly available and is only accessible (albeit indirectly) by the AutoPod dashboard.
We continually make a 'segmented' recording of your station's output which saves the files in a series of 10 second chunks. This means that, using the dashboard, you can access any of your content from the last 60 days by exporting between a start and end time in the episode creation process.
Episodes are never created by directly recording your stream, instead episodes take a copy of all 10 second chunks between the alloted start and end times, re-stitch them back together into a single piece of audio and then copy this file to the above mentioned episode storage area.
