Linux @lemmy.ml imaradio @lemmy.ca 1 yr. ago

how to listen to podcasts on computer?

My phone is broken and I neeeed to listen to my podcasts while this is resolving. I thought it would be simple enough but I have been banging my head for days now.

There are lots of rss readers and podcatchers.

Ideally the downloading and listening would be integrated. Failing that, I can put up with 2 separate steps.

I can do the downloading although it's kind of clunky. Best for this are RSSGuard and Gpodder. But once you get the files, things totally break down.

minimally require:

track listening status
properly access metadata, not just going by filenames.
- most crucially: name of podcast, episode title, published date, download date
- maybe the downloader has some role to play in writing file/metadata correctly but the ones I have tried don't seem to do it
don't need to make an account/server to do the above

I tried everything in arch/aur repos. A few of them had totally broken UIs not sure what the deal is. I am open to TUI options but none seemed viable.

manjaro/xfce

20 comments

I think Pocket Casts has a web app
- Sure does!
- It does and I use it all the time.
I use audiobookshelf for both audiobooks and podcasts. It can handle the podcast metadata well, show pictures and descriptions, track your listen progress, etc.
I think you have correctly described state of open source podcast aggregators.

While it seams like non important matter, with control YT has on content, podcast are becoming incrisingly important for me.
- I’m a bit ignorant to this subject, love FOSS and have used it often over the years but have only really started wanting to use it as exclusively as possible. Is it just YT that makes a podcast RSS or aggregator difficult, seems like it wouldnt be a big ask. Sorry if this is a dumb question
  
  I am not sure what is the question, but will try.
  
  I don't think YT is making it difficult, just that because of YT peope are not motivated to use and, by extend, make good podcast agreggators.
  
  Btw. IMHO Gpodder is the way to go, and connect it with some music player.
Liferea might be what you're looking for. It's in debian's packages and downloads/plays podcasts pretty easily.
- it looks like a low-bs rss reader. nice!
Don't know much about this but have you tried Kasts?
- Yes this was the winner!
  
  Happy to hear you liked it!
I can think of three apps that I have used and liked (since you didn't mention that you tried ~~that~~ them already) Cpod, Kasts and Vocal. See if any of them works for ya
- vocal: crash on opml import
  
  kasts: seems to work for downloading and playing. thanks!
  
  cpod: not working in aur: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/cpod
  
  @monobot@lemmy.ml
  
  Damn. Sorry you're going through this. See if gnome's podcasts works for ya? Btw, cpod works for me just fine on fedora. I actually just tried it. I got it as a flatpak, though Maybe try the flatpak app and see if that works? 🤞
Maybe more setup than you want to do for a temporary solution, but I use MPD and the Cantata front end, which supports podcasts well
I know it's not what you really want, and I haven't tried it yet, but I think your best bet is probably podfetch. I don't know if you've looked into it yet, but it's basically a gpodder server with a web podcast frontend tied to it. It's the next thing I'm going to try.

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