Why was my sample link rejected? (YouTube, Spotify, Dropbox, Google Drive and others)
Your podcast host is fine. What we can’t accept is a link to a web page or player. Judges listen to your sample in our own player, and that player needs a link that goes straight to the audio file itself. Links from the sites below open a page or an app instead of a file, so they can’t be played in our player:
YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Box, MEGA and WeTransfer.
The easiest fix: use the file link from your own RSS feed
Every podcast host already stores your episodes as direct audio files. You don’t need a separate audio site.
- Open your RSS feed URL in a browser.
- Find the episode you want to submit and look for its <enclosure url=”…”> tag.
- Copy the address inside url=”…”. It usually ends in .mp3 or .m4a.
- Paste it into the sample field. If it plays when you paste it into a browser tab, it will work for us.
Don’t want to dig through your feed?
Choose hosted upload when you enter your sample. You upload the file to us and we host it for the judges. Hosted upload has a fee, which is shown during checkout.
See also: Where can I host a sample file? for other places to host a file.
