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 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. Go to the station settings in the admin panel

2. Find the “Sound archive” section

3. Turn on “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. Save your 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 “Manage archive milestones” in the same settings section.

1. Click “New milestone”

2. Fill in the details:

   • 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): 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

3. Save the milestone

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.