Clip insertion processing (manual vs automatic)

Pinecast manages clip insertion ahead of time: we process your episodes' original audio once, then serve the updated audio to each listener for as long as the processed audio remains valid. How long that audio remains valid for and when the reprocessing takes place depends on what changes may have taken place.

Automatic updates

If you change an episode's audio file (e.g., you replace the audio on an episode) or change the placeholders in an episode (e.g., you add or remove placeholders, change their tags, or update their timecodes), reprocessing will happen immediately when you save. The updated episode audio will be served immediately after uploading completes.

During the time that automatic processing is taking place, the episode is marked as being unavailable and will temporarily not appear in feeds, websites, or elsewhere. This prevents the old audio from being served improperly. Processing usually concludes in a few seconds for most audio files.

Manual updates

Some changes are not processed immediately:

1. Deleting tags
2. Adding new clips
3. Deleting or disabling clips
4. Changing the tags on a clip
5. Changing the podcasts that a clip is available for
6. Changing a clip's priority or "play only once" status
7. Changing a clip's audio

When these changes are made, the podcasts that would be affected by these changes are marked as requiring clip publishing. This is shown on the podcast dashboard and on the clip insertion status page (under the Clip Insertion tab on your main account dashboard).

Publishing must be done manually per-podcast. During publishing, the old audio will continue to be served until processing concludes.