That's a nice and unexpected bit of news for the day.
I've been using Pocket Casts for awhile, it's indeed a very nice app, and other than the UI tumult from a few years back has been pretty reliable.
I was a bit disappointed recently to discover that it doesn't offer a way to export data from it, which is pretty bad (i.e. your listening history and starred episodes, not your list of subscribed podcasts). Hopefully it being OSS means that's something someone can add (heck I'd look into it myself as I was dreading having to manually extract the data myself or MITM the sync service to do it).
With the help of the web-player and the developer console I could copy the necessary auth-headers.
I built a little deno project recently which scrapes my Spotify and PocketCasts history regularly and stores the history to a Supabase PostgreSQL database.
This is great. I skimmed the code. I’ll have to check Spotify API to see if it’s possible to grab just podcasts from Spotify. Then I can try to see if I can do this stuff with another app. In general, happy to see this project for the ideas.
Very nice! Will check out your repo, but this requires Pocket Casts Plus, right? (I don't have one, I purchased the Android app a long long time ago, but do not have access to the web player at all AFAIK).
> I was a bit disappointed recently to discover that it doesn't offer a way to export data from it, which is pretty bad (i.e. your listening history and starred episodes, not your list of subscribed podcasts).
Maybe overlooked? Settings -> Import & Export OPML. Can't recall if it includes listening history and starred episodes but subscriptions for sure. This is the case for Android -- can't speak for iOS.
Overcast produces an export with everything, but warns they don't know of any apps that import it. The nice thing about OPML though is it's XML. An importer will just skip what it doesn't understand and import the subscriptions.
Podcast Addict does that, you can backup the full app settings, and more than just the subscriptions/listened episodes. I'm guessing the format is specific to the app's export/import feature, but could be worked with.
As the other comment mentioned, yes, this only contains a very short and not very useful list of the podcast subscriptions which if you have ~50 podcasts you subscribe to is easy to even manually resubscribe to, it doesn't have any of the useful data which isn't as easy to reconstruct.
Absolutely amazing app, by far the best podcast player I've used. The recent update that (finally!) implemented a folder organization system was just the icing on the cake.
I've been using it since it was owned by the original developers, Aussie indy outfit Shifty Jelly (along with their late, and definitely lamented, Pocket Weather). It's the one app that has gone with me as I've shifted between iOS and Android over the years. It's probably the only app I regularly use that I've never checked out alternatives for, as it's just so good.
Good to know I’m not alone. I’ve used it since (according to the app) 1/14/17 and have amassed 51d 7h of listening time. I feel like I’ve used it since around 2014 or so, but I could be wrong. I know somewhere around that time there was a platform switch and stats got lost.
In any event I was overjoyed when they grandfathered me to a lifetime subscription after switching to a paid model. I truly, deeply appreciate this app and all the work they put into this.
It's nearly 400 days for me, but the key feature is the "127 days" I've saved using their speedup features (intro skipping, ~1.5x playback, silence reduction).
The latter two don't just save time, but make hosts sound more lively. Podcast hosts are trained to speak slowly and carefully, which is good for most audiences, but I prefer it a bit tighter. I listen while running or driving and it helps me stay engaged.
Pocket Casts has some remarkable algorithms which do the speed-ups while remaining natural-sounding or forced (at least at the speeds I listen).
Time really flies... I paid $2.99 for Pocket Casts on Android in 2011 and $3.99 on iOS in 2014. Glad they are sharing this under MPL. Just a great app.
Also a plus subscriber. The app is almost perfect, missing only a couple of features - custom artwork (a lot of Patreon podcasters use the same artwork for free & premium feeds) and tracking file uploads in the play history.
That's insane. I've been holding back from using Pocket Casts precisely because there FOSS alternatives like Antennapod and Podverse - but I wasn't that happy with them.
Props to Automattic for being an incredible force for good!
Edit: Wow 12$/year is a nice price for the Plus plan (vs. Podverse's 3/month, though that's not terrible either). They just got themselves a new subscriber. I'd skip the trial if I could. Take my money!
I’ve switched to Podverse recently, how’s Pocketcasts wrt podcasting 2.0 features? Life streaming badges, chapters, sats streaming, boosting etc?
I have to say, Podverse was rough some months ago but it’s improving very fast. I have the feeling they are more friendly towards the decentralized nature of podcasting whereas NPR may have mixed motivation.
It’s important to choose wisely imho, the once quite open podcast ecosystem is being gobbled up by YT and Spotify at an alarming rate.
I completely missed the sell off from NPR to Automattic. Glad to see this news as a good omen. Hard to believe but I've been using this same app for 11 years now.
I use AntennaPod[1] these days, but Pocket Casts was one of the few Android apps I actually ever purchased. It was that good and simply the best podcast app at the time. Glad to see it open sourced.
I'd be happy if they also open sourced the web app so someone can finally implement their filter/playlist feature over there. It's the main reason I quit using the app a while ago. Being able to sync playlists is such a basic feature.
I've personally switched to Spotify. It honestly kind of sucks as a podcast app, but the sync, and also episode search and Echo support are at least there. I've heard Castbox is also supposed to be decent.
This is amazing. I'm already a Plus subscriber and glad to see that I backed the right horse.
I switched to Pocket Casts from Overcast because of playback issues and lack of Chromecast support, and stayed for the very polished experience and cross platform support (there's even a desktop app now!).
Your podcast player of choice is like your gang colors, people get pretty passionate about it. In my case Pocket Casts is the one that works exactly the way I expect and gets out of the way.
Selfish, but I was mad at myself that they made it free just a couple or so months after I paid for it. As a college student, I resented them a whole bunch for it because I was on the fence for a little over a year before pulling the trigger only for them to make it free (and I didn’t feel like I could have got my moneys worth because of that). If only I had waited a smidgeon longer!
If you had purchased Pocket Casts ($2.99USD?) and Pocket Casts Plus ($9.00USD) before the freemium model was introduced, you were eventually given "Lifetime Member" status and are not required to pay a recurring fee to use Pocket Casts Plus.
- Pocket Casts is crossplatform, including a web player.
- I’ve had slow sync issues with AntennaPod that I think are related to gpodder.
It’s been awhile since I’ve used both. I’d bet that AntennaPod has features that Pocket Casts don’t. A huge reason I started to use AntennaPod in the first place was the license and source availability.
Pocket Casts has been fantastic (using it since 2015). May only complaint remains that the maximum playback speed is limited to 3x. I guess Not too many people miss that.
The Pihole comment is on point, I've had to whitelist certain podcast providers as well. Additionally, enabling notifications seems to help keep Pocket Casts "awake" and reliably downloading on a schedule, as noted in the app settings.
I just recently switched to Snipd and have not looked back. Pocket Cast were great over the years but I don't see them innovating. With Snipd there is almost always a full transcript available and an AI generated Table of Contents to cue through. I can easily save a transcribed clip I am listening to for export to a TfT program like obsidian. Not sure how I ever lived without these features now I am used to them lol.
Nice to see! Purchased back in 2015 and it’s been a daily driver since then. Props to Automattic for honouring existing purchasers with lifetime subscriptions!
Is Pocket Cast the player that had a rather impressive silence removing feature, and is that part also now free software?
I can't remember which app I used before moving to the free software antennapod, though I remember that being the one feature I missed. Various free software apps now have a version of the feature, but they seem to remove all silence killing any kind of comedic timing.
Damn. Not sure why it's so tough to copy, the key aspect seemed to be choosing how long a gap is skipped that none of the free software versions have. That doesn't seem like a difficult feature to add nor one likely patentable but I'm hardly an expert.
Pocket Cast has a silence removing feature, but in my opinion it's rather bad (on iOS at least). It was the main reason for me together with artefacts when speeding the playback up to change to another podcast player. Both Castro (which I'm using now) and Overcast have a superb silence removing feature and artefact-free speedup.
Uhh is this right? Seems like the vast majority of the main iOS app UI files are all dumped in the same folder along with all the assets. No organization.
I guess knowing that people will criticise your messy code is one of the reasons why people don’t open source more things. It’s nice to have the code open-source even though it’s not perfect.
Oh this is cool! I've been using AntennaPod for a few years because it was open source, but lately started having issues with the media session and was looking for an alternative.
I've been using Pocket Casts for awhile, it's indeed a very nice app, and other than the UI tumult from a few years back has been pretty reliable.
I was a bit disappointed recently to discover that it doesn't offer a way to export data from it, which is pretty bad (i.e. your listening history and starred episodes, not your list of subscribed podcasts). Hopefully it being OSS means that's something someone can add (heck I'd look into it myself as I was dreading having to manually extract the data myself or MITM the sync service to do it).