ARD Audiothek (recently rebranded to ARD Sounds) already provides RSS feeds for many of its shows — but not all of them. And naturally, the shows I’m interested in are usually the ones missing a feed. Subscribe in a podcast player? No luck. Check back manually for new episodes? No thanks.

So I wrote a script.

How it works

You paste the URL of a show page, and the script generates a fully valid podcast RSS feed from it — with all the iTunes tags that podcast apps need for proper display. Internally it extracts the show’s URN and queries the ARD GraphQL API. The response has everything: title, description, publish date, duration, and audio file. Because the API sometimes leaves out file sizes — which causes many players to reject the feed — the script fetches missing sizes via an HTTP HEAD request.

All results are cached for one hour. Besides show page URLs, the script also accepts a URN directly:

?url=https://www.ardsounds.de/sendung/alles-gelogen/urn:ard:show:14817e20efdace2e/
?urn=urn:ard:show:14817e20efdace2e
?urn=urn:ard:show:14817e20efdace2e&latest=10

The tool

Alongside the script there’s a small page on this site where you can build the feed URL without touching the URL yourself.