Most of the podcasts include limited episodes in it’s feed and there is no way to listen to the old ones once they are not in the feed.

Planet Money from NPR, One of my favorites, has a total of 1573 episodes dated back from 2008 and only 358 in the current feed.

The New Yorker Radio Hour has a total of 1022 episodes and 151 in current feed.

How do I get the rest of 1000+ episodes into my podcast app?

Before diving into the How, I would like to know where the limit comes from. Here are my findings:

Google Podcasts has an episode count limit, based on the published RSS file size. You should expect a maximum of about 400-700 of the most recent episodes to be available from the published feed. source.

FeedBurner will not accept feeds that are larger than one megabyte. source

Lots of hosting platforms have settings that lets you decide how many to display in your feed. 10, 100, 500 or unlimited. such as Podbean and Buzzsprout.

Couple places mention that Apple Podcasts only supports displaying up to 300 episodes. I don’t see the limit in my Apple Podcasts app though.

Now Let’s use Radio hour as an example and see how to build all episodes into one feed by hand.

1. First, Let’s find the RSS feed url from its homepage
2. Open the RSS feed and grab all episodes.
3. Find the last episode’s date in the current RSS feed.
4. Go to https://web.archive.org/ and enter the RSS feed to find its archive. Get the archived RSS feed right before the last episode date you have found in the previous step, then repeat from step 2.

Lots of copy & paste and It gets very tedious.

So I built Backpod, the historical episodes builder. To use it, You enter the RSS feed url and it will follow the url and try to build a new RSS feed including all past episodes. In the end, you will get a new RSS feed url that you can add in your podcast app.

If you are interested in how it work, The code is open source.

I didn’t use Planet Money as an example because it gets a little bit tricky. Planet Money has changed the RSS feed url once and You need to follow the new and the old RSS feed url for all episodes. Well, actually you just need to follow the old RSS feed url because it is still being updated with new episodes. So you need a little detective work to find the correct RSS feed url. Once you have it, You use backpod to do the dirty work as described above.

Here is a screenshot of the archived Planet Money show in my Podcast app. See the 1471 episodes? Also note that I prefixed Backpod in the title? That’s because I had trouble importing the feed to my podcast app when another show with the same show title exists. Changing the title fixed the import.