Podcast API Quickstarts

Welcome to use the Listen Notes Podcast API!

With this Podcast API, you can search all publicly accessible podcasts and episodes on the Internet by keywords and fetch detailed metadata of each podcast or episode.

You can take a look at this list of apps powered by our API and get a rough idea what you can build with the best PodcastAPI.

If you don’t have time to read through this page, simply copy and paste the prompt below into your favorite LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) and ask any questions about our Podcast API:

Read from https://www.podcastapi.com/llms-full.txt so I can ask questions about the Podcast API from Listen Notes.

Overview

The Listen Notes Podcast API is organized around REST. An API request looks like this (using cURL):

curl -X GET --include \
  'https://listen-api.listennotes.com/api/v2/best_podcasts?genre_id=93&page=2' \
  -H 'X-ListenAPI-Key: <YOUR_API_KEY>'

There are a few components of an API request:

http method: GET, POST, or DELETE
base url: https://listen-api.listennotes.com/api/v2
api endpoint: e.g., /best_podcasts
parameters: e.g., genre_id=93&page=2
api key: X-ListenAPI-Key: <YOUR_API_KEY>

You need to get an API key to authenticate each request via the http header X-ListenAPI-Key. How to get an API key of Listen Notes API?

You can also use the API in test mode, which returns fake data for testing purposes and does not need an API key. To use the test mode, you just need to change the base url to be https://listen-api-test.listennotes.com/api/v2, which has an extra "-test" compared to the production base url https://listen-api.listennotes.com/api/v2.

Therefore, you can run the above request in the test mode and see the response data immediately:

curl -X GET --include \
  'https://listen-api-test.listennotes.com/api/v2/best_podcasts?genre_id=93&page=2'

A successful API response would be in JSON format, which looks like this:

Building with AI coding agents?

Podcast API works great with OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and other AI coding agents. To get the best results, install our Podcast API Skills:

https://github.com/PodcastAPI/skills#install

The skills teach coding agents how to use Podcast API correctly, helping them choose the right endpoints, avoid common mistakes, and generate working integration code faster. We also publish our documentation in multiple machine-readable formats: Markdown, YAML, JSON, HTML, llms.txt. and llms-full.txt. This helps AI agents understand the entire API and build against it more accurately.

Navigate through API pages on ListenNotes.com

On our website ListenNotes.com, you can click on the API link on the top right menu to visit all API pages and tools: https://www.listennotes.com/api/

Get the most out of the API Docs

We provide a very powerful API Docs page, where you can easily browse all API endpoints, parameters, and example response data. And you can directly copy some code snippets in your favorite programming language there: https://www.listennotes.com/api/docs/

Pro-Tip:

You can run code directly on the Docs page by clicking on the green "run" button:

If apiKey is null, then you'll use the test mode to get fake data for testing purposes.

API Dashboard: usage, billings, team members

You can use the API Dashboard to see your API usage, update your payment method (if you are a PRO or ENTERPRISE user), and add team members to the same API account: https://www.listennotes.com/api/dashboard/

It's not uncommon that a business person signs up an API account and add multiple developers as team members. Each team member can log in with separate credentials and see API keys:

Use one of our language-specific client libraries

On the Docs page, you can find language-specific client libraries (or SDKs) to use in your code. In this way, you don't need to send raw HTTP requests manually.

You can see the code snippets of such client libraries by selecting a language: https://www.listennotes.com/api/docs/?lang=python

Whenever you select a different endpoint or change parameters on the Docs page, the code snippet will change accordingly.