Experimenting with AntennaPod I notice that quite a few podcasts use unencrypted HTTP over port 80. For example, podcasts from the BBC. AntennaPod itself offers no way to require TLS.
Also, AntennaPod does not strip the tracking information from podcast URLs.
Self-hosting a podcast server might not be a bad idea.
It's desktop only (no Android or iOS support) which makes me wonder: what percentage of overall podcast listening occurs on a desktop computer? Polls on this are all over the place, but I would guess maybe 10-15%? For me, podcast listening has always been an inherently mobile activity, and it would drive me nuts if I had podcatchers on multiple devices that were out of sync with each other.
gPodder started in 2005 when I needed a tool on Linux to download podcasts and sync it to my iPod mini, so even back then it was mostly about downloading on the Desktop, and my phone of the day didn't have much storage space for audio, let alone a 3.5mm headphone jack (I remember getting a "MP3 player phone" with 3.5mm headphone jack and dedicated media player buttons, the 5310 around 2006 or 2007 at which point the iPod as a dedicated device starting to become redundant).
At some point though, phones (and "mobile Internet devices") became powerful and programmable enough that it made sense to port gPodder to "Desktop Linux Userland"-based devices and phones (N800, N810, N900, N9, Jolla) and run it directly on the phone.
These days, my day-to-day podcast consumption happens with the built-in Podcasts app on the iPhone, but gPodder (on the Desktop) is still useful for downloading and archiving (hoarding) YouTube subscriptions (especially since there are so many ads on the web and TV versions of YouTube), mixes from Soundcloud and others and just interesting podcast episodes that might not be available in the future.
I even recently submitted a patch to re-introduce iPod support, so the current version can sync to iPod minis again if you want to have a distraction-free retro podcast listening experience on the go :)
The app is actually linked from the submitted page, but it's easy to miss there.
I also noticed that if I create list of shows to listen to later, I end up listening to more interesting stuff, as I filter out items which are not as useful few weeks later.
Today, there‘s an adaptive variant of GPodder[0] so that people with PinePhone, Librem 5 or ported Android phones running Linux Mobile can use GTK-based GPodder on mobile.
(This does not matter in terms of numbers, as that‘s at best a few thousand people, but still.)
> Polls on this are all over the place, but I would guess maybe 10-15%?
Edison Research says that desktops/laptops account for 13% of listening in Q4'2021, having dropped 7% since the start of that year. I'd predict that it falls to under 10% by the end of 2022.
It is probably low as you presumed, but I personally try to do as little as possible on my phone. gPodder was great for me when I was actively listening to podcasts at the beginning of the pandemic. I appreciate the snappiness of desktop apps over web apps, so I'm probably the target audience.
In the early days of podcasts I listened to them on my computer (downloaded over precious dial up time, where the time to download the episode was longer than the time required to listen to it), but as soon as I got an iPod they were a mobile thing for me.
From my unscientific surveys between friends I'm the only dedicated 100% only-on-the-desktop listener, so I'd guess more 5% - but maybe 10-15% for "I don't care, wherever".
Incidentally I had used JuiceReceiver for years until it stopped working (due to the SSL algos from 2005 finally giving in) and then wrote a replacement in C++/Qt with an online backend, just to track which episodes I listened to (and because it was fun, mostly).
Yes, desktop only, however there are a number of podcast apps that support gpodder.net syncing. I use AntennaPod on Android, and gPodder on Fedora desktop.
I used to only listen on desktop, at work, and for a while with gPodder. Now I use AntennaPod on mobile and sometimes others. Desktop is nice when you're doing something routine and enjoy hearing a conversation or trivia in the background.
gPodded is pretty neat, I have tried it on Sailfish (and likely also long time ago on N800 with maemo)
I just discovered podverse from browsing f-droid a few days ago, has some similarities with pocket cast which I have been using since before they were sold the first time.
You can also use the news app for nextcloud to show podcasts along with rss news stories, if you are looking for something along those lines.
I actually just submitted the podverse link for discussion here just a few mins ago, so I am pasting a link:
I used gPodder on the N900 long after after it was useless as a phone (because of the network upgrade), until downloading broke because I couldn't update ssl easily (and the internet had upgraded.)
It integrated with Panucci, which for me has an ideal (although a little unfinished) interface for playing podcasts/ebooks, I don't know what I'm going to do without Panucci when the N900 finally goes kaput. I heard its code is horrific, though, and that the qPodder guy hated it.
Yes, on the N900 (and the N800/N810) before that, gPodder was sharing most of the UI code even with the Gtk Desktop version (with some special-casing for the touch-friendly Hildon UI), and initially the "system" music player was used to play back podcasts. Panucci added support for resuming playback and a UI tailored towards audiobooks and podcasts.
Panucci is still around and should be usable on the Desktop, but the last commit was several years ago: https://github.com/gpodder/panucci
Starting with the N9 and later Sailfish OS, the UI of the mobile app was re-done in Qt/QML (so don't name your project after the toolkit of the day...). There, audio playback was integrated into the main application, so there was no need for a separate app like Panucci (this also made it easier to sync fine-grained playback positions between devices using gpodder.net, although this also works with MPRIS2 and e.g. VLC on the Desktop these days).
I'm desperate to find a podcatcher suitable for binging. macOS or iOS. Like chewing thru the 400 episodes of the (OG) History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.
I've tried every iOS app I could find. They're all turrible for this use case. Yes, even Overcast. [1]
I truly wonder if anybody making the apps ever used their own apps.
I just tried gPodder. Alas, the UI is 1/4 size.
[1] Overcast shows played episodes in the unplayed tab. So to download episode 200, I have to scroll down thru 199 played episodes, then manually download the next episodes. Yes, I filed bug reports.
A more accurate way of saying it is "machines you don't have admin rights on". As a standard user, you can still run pretty much anything from anywhere. There are ways to lock this down, of course.
I was looking for an open source client to reclaim my podcast collection and found everything I was looking for in gPodder. There doesn't seem to have much discussion about this great app in the past here, so let's discuss !
I'm happy to be able to download "physical" (how ironic) copies of my favourites episodes in mp3 and can't wait to try to automatise their transfer to my fiio X3 for offline listening.
Also, I can see an alternative to Youtube in this, so feel free to share flow if you do use gPodder for staying uptodate with your YT subscriptions !
There was some discussion about integrating SponsorBlock into AntennaPod (a popular open source podcast app) a while back, but it didn't go anywhere. Ajay (developer of SB) was very open to the idea, so anyone interested in developing ad skipping technology for podcasts should probably get in touch with them. I think getting a proof of concept podcast app that skips ads should not be all that difficult.
I wonder if you could train some machine learning model using the data from SponsorBlock and achieve good results on podcasts as well. That way you wouldn't be dependent on a crowdsourced online database for your offline listening. Alternatively, even creating a transscript using something like [1] and scanning for words like "sponsor", "ad" or specific company names might already be a good enough heuristic.
When I learned about tune finger printing, I was running that to identify the little motif that a podcast I listened to often, would play before and after their 'mid roll' of ads.. I thought that could be a good way to automate such things, but then they just seemed to change that tune every few months.
I love paying for content like that (when the content is good of course). It’s one of the few mediums where some creators allow me to be in control of how they monetize my viewership.
It drives me crazy that on YouTube I pay for premium and still need to sidestep ads. It makes sense; the creators don’t get paid directly from my membership and if they did it would be fractions of pennies. But that’s the problem; I want to support them directly. The platform is nice, but it’s mostly fungible. The excellent content often isn’t.
I think an hour+ podcast is absolutely valuable. Some are incredibly thoughtful and well-produced. I hope more podcasters adopt this model!
Apparently I escaped the grey! Thanks for the vote of confidence.
It’s always strange to see grey comments with no responses explaining why anyone disagrees. In some cases it’s clear – maybe someone appears to be a troll or something. In this case I wonder why someone would downvote me for wanting to support content creators. It isn’t a perfect analogy but it seems that selling software to users is something a lot of us here can get behind – wouldn’t we want our users to want to support us? Maybe I’m missing something though.
As far as I understand there is no way to synchronize the progress of podcasts. I often listen to longer podcasts and jump between devices. Right now I am stuck with Pocket Casts and use WSA on my work and gaming machine but obviously it's not the best solution.
Cool to see this still being developed. I used to use gPodder back in the 2000s to tag and organize podcasts, rename the files based on the feed metadata and tag the genre as 'podcast' so that I could segment that content on my Sansa Clip mp3 player.
Sort of wish I'd more carefully archived some of those old episodes, especially Wiretap. In that era it felt like there less than a dozen high-quality podcasts and it seemed possible to listen to everything.
I've been using this a few years.
- improving steadily
- naming on episodes used to make sense (but this could be a podcast issue)
- I've a bunch of podcasts (CBC News ones for instance) which re-download "as new" every reload. This is annoying. I suspect advertising has a great deal to do with it. No idea how to mitigate.
- Could do with better handling when podcasts go offline or move (404 on URL)
When I first got into podcasts I didn't like that every client had a UI. I just wanted the files and use my audio player of choice (Music Player Daemon). So I wrote one myself. It breaks a lot though.
gPodder does ship with a command-line interface "gpo" that can just do the subscribing and downloading part which might suit your needs (while still retaining the possibility to bring up the GUI if needed, the on-disk format is the same).
If you roll your own, https://github.com/gpodder/podcastparser is a neat little Python library that has been split out from (and is now used by) gPodder, as dealing with all kinds of RSS (and Atom) specialities is kind of something you want to outsource if possible.
I'll check out `gpo`, thank you. To be honest the other reason for this was an exercise in Haskell a while ago, and an exercise in Python long, long ago before that. I'm beyond that interest these days so something that doesn't break constantly sounds like a good plan.
is there a ~/.config or file-based way to configure gpodder?
i listen to podcasts on a variety of devices. when i find a new podcast, it's nice to be able to add the RSS URL to a single dotfiles repo and then deploy it to all my devices. i see the option to manually OPML import via the GUI: can i just stash an OMPL file somewhere and have it auto-load that on start?
You can use `gpo import FILENAME|URL` to import an OPML on the command line, or `gpo export FILENAME` to export and OPML on the command line. The "import" command doesn't delete any subscriptions, you can use `gpo list` to get a list of current subscriptions and `gpo unsubscribe URL` to remove a subscription.
The `gpo` command-line utility can do most of the tasks of the GUI that you want to automate.
okay, thanks for the tips! i was looking at the mobile-friendly Linux podcast apps last month and had mixed experiences. passed over gpodder because i saw a sqlite database and thought it'd be hard to configure externally. but i just installed it on my Pinephone and great first impressions! i'll take a look at integrating this into my nix config after i try it out a bit more, maybe make some wrapper that ingests some external OPML on start. i'll swing by IRC if i have anything worth sharing or get blocked :^)
yeah i just made a ~/.config/gpodderFeeds.opml file and pointed gpodder.desktop to a wrapper that invokes `gpo import ~/.config/gpodderFeeds.opml` before handing off to the real gpodder.
i think this causes the start time to be linear w.r.t. the number of feeds, but it’s working fine for the time being
