Tapesearch API Access

Welcome to the Tapesearch API. We're excited to see what you create using our data.

Your API key

Do not share your API key with others, or expose it in the browser or other client-side code. In order to protect the security of your account, Tapesearch may also automatically disable any API key that has leaked publicly.

Using the API

The full list of endpoints and their call signatures can be found here: https://api.tapesearch.com/v1/public/docs

To test out an endpoint in your browser, follow the documentation link above, click the green "Authorize" button and paste in your API key. You can test each endpoint by clicking the "Try it out" button and see the response body.

If there are specific endpoints you require for your app that are missing, please get in touch using the chat box.

Example API calls

An example API call using curl is as follows:

# Example API call using curl
curl -H "X-API-Key: your_api_key_here" https://api.tapesearch.com/v1/public/count

This returns counts of the podcasts and episodes in the database:

{
  "podcasts": 5864,
  "episodes": 2399340,
  "transcripts": 2384750,
  "transcribed": 0.9939191611026366
}

An example call to fetch an episode using Python's requests is as follows:

# Example API call using Python requests 
import requests

url = "https://api.tapesearch.com/v1/public/episode"
headers = {
    "X-API-Key": "your_api_key_here",
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
}
params = {
    # This is for https://tapesearch.com/episode/the-strange-story-of-the-1904-olympic-marathon/Jex4niuSDuzZmFLBrGcQHX
    "uid": "Jex4niuSDuzZmFLBrGcQHX",
}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, params=params)
print(response.content)

Output:

{
  "e": {
    "summary": "<p>The Olympic marathon of 1904 is an incredible story filled with wacky characters, cheating, heat and humidity, dust and dirt, and oh yeah, a few actual qualified athletes.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p>",
    "duration": 2937,
    "uid": "Jex4niuSDuzZmFLBrGcQHX",
    "transcript": [
      {
        "timestamp": "0:00.0",
        "text": "Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science",
        "location": 0
      },
      {
        "timestamp": "0:05.4",
        "text": "podcast in America.",
        "location": 5.48
      },
      {
        "timestamp": "0:06.8",
        "text": "I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound",
        "location": 6.88
      },
      {
        "timestamp": "0:11.6",
        "text": "universe in our heads.",
        "location": 11.6
      },
      ...

Rate limits

The rate limit on the API plan is 2000 requests per day, after which you will start seeing 429 errors. If your use case requires a higher rate limit please get in touch.

By using our API you agree to our terms of service.