# Quickstart

Three commands get you from nothing to a podcast feed your phone can subscribe to. The only decision you have to make first is *where the folder lives*.


# 1. Make a library

A library is a folder that is **served on the public web**. A pCloud public folder, a public S3 or R2 bucket, an nginx docroot, a GitHub Pages repo: anything works, as long as a podcast app can fetch a URL from it without logging in.

Most consumer sync services cannot do this, including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and OneDrive. They hand out one share link per file rather than serving a folder, and earmark needs to build episode URLs by appending to a folder. See [Where a library can live](publishing.md#where-a-library-can-live) for what works and what to do if your folder is on one of the others.

``` bash
earmark init ~/pCloud\ Drive/public/audio \
  --base-url https://filedn.com/XXXX/audio
```

`--base-url` is the public URL that folder is served at. earmark cannot guess it, and publishing needs it, so it is worth getting right now rather than later. If you skip it, `earmark config` can set it afterwards.

pCloud mounts as `pCloud Drive` on macOS, and the space in that name has to be escaped or quoted every time you type it. If that bothers you, make a symlink once and forget about it:

``` bash
ln -s ~/pCloud\ Drive ~/pcloud
earmark init ~/pcloud/public/audio --base-url https://filedn.com/XXXX/audio
```

`init` also records this library as your default, so the commands work from anywhere on your machine.


# 2. Publish something

``` bash
earmark publish https://example.com/some-long-article
```

That one command extracts the text, rewrites it into something that sounds good read aloud, narrates it, writes `audio/<name>.mp3`, and adds it to `feed.xml`. The first run stops to ask whether it may download the model.

It works on documents too: PDF, DOCX, PPTX, EPUB, HTML, Markdown.

``` bash
earmark publish paper.pdf
```


# 3. Subscribe

``` bash
earmark feed
```

    2026-08-23   0:22:14    10.4 MB  Attention Is All You Need

    1 episode(s), 10 MB total
    feed      https://filedn.com/XXXX/audio/feed.xml

That last URL is what you paste into a podcast app. Because a private feed is not in any directory, you cannot find it by searching for its name. You hand the app the URL itself. [Subscribing on your phone](subscribing.md) covers where the URL goes in each app.


# What you just made

    ~/pCloud Drive/public/audio/     <- the library
      earmark.toml                   its settings
      feed.xml   episodes.json       the feed
      cover.jpg
      text/
        attention-is-all-you-need.md   the words, yours to edit
      audio/
        attention-is-all-you-need.mp3  the narration

Two ideas are worth reading next, in this order: [the library is a folder](the-library.md), and [`publish` is the last of three steps](the-pipeline.md) you can stop at any of.