Sound archive

The sound archive is a history-first public page on your station’s website that lets listeners browse the entire back-catalogue year by year: how many episodes aired each year, the station’s milestones, and the most-listened episodes of each era. It lives at the /archive/ path of your site (for example https://yourstation.enacast.com/archive/), and shows up as “Archive” in the navigation menu when enabled.

Enabled by default for long-standing stations

The sound archive is automatically enabled for stations that have been EnaCast clients for more than 5 years. Other stations can enable it manually from the EnaCast Studio settings.

The three views

The page offers three visualizations of the same catalogue. Visitors can switch between them with the “View” selector:

• Chronology: a vertical timeline with the years as protagonists — an activity histogram to jump between years, the station’s milestones, each year’s most-listened episodes, and the founding “Day 1” card. It’s the view that works best without JavaScript and the recommended default.
• Soundtape: a draggable horizontal tape spanning all the years; moving the playhead shows the selected year’s most-listened episodes.
• Map: a program × year matrix, heatmap-style — colour intensity shows each program’s activity in each year. Clicking a cell shows that program’s most-listened episodes for that year.

Rankings show no numbers

The “most listened” lists are ordered by real plays, but play counts are never shown publicly — only the ranking position.

Enabling the sound archive

1. Open the station settings: in the management panel at studio.enacast.com, in the sidebar, under Settings, open Settings

2. Find the “Sound Archive” card

3. Tick “Enable the Sound Archive page”

4. Choose the “Default view” (Chronology, Soundtape or Map): which visualization loads first. Visitors can always switch between the three.

5. Click “Save changes”

For the archive to appear, the station must have the podcast service enabled — the archive is built from the published episodes.

Managing milestones

Milestones are the chronology’s editorial content: key moments in the station’s history (a studio move, an anniversary, an award…) shown highlighted next to the years. They’re managed from the “Manage archive milestones” link on the same card, which opens the Sound Archive page: the “New milestone” form is at the top and the Milestones list below it.

1. Fill in the “New milestone” form:

   • Year: the year where the milestone appears in the chronology
   • Date (optional): exact date, to order it within the year and display it
   • Title: the milestone’s name
   • Description: a short text explaining it
   • Founding milestone (Day 1): check it for the founding moment — it renders as a special card at the end of the chronology
   • Linked episode (optional): click “Choose episode” and link an episode (for example, the first broadcast) — the public site will show a listen button on the milestone with that episode, wired to the persistent player
   • Order: to order several milestones within the same year

2. Click “Save”

In the Milestones list, “Edit” loads a milestone into the form so you can change it, and “Delete” removes it.

The first broadcast

The most powerful use of the linked episode is the founding card: mark the milestone as founding, link the first broadcast’s episode, and listeners can hear how it all began with a single click.

What shows automatically

Nothing else needs configuring: the rest of the page is built automatically from the station’s catalogue.

• The global stats (episodes, hours of audio, programs, years on air) and per-year counts are computed nightly.
• Each year’s most-listened episodes are ranked by real plays.
• Hidden programs and their episodes are excluded; archived (off-air) programs do appear — the archive is precisely the home of the full history.