Idea: Podcast Library

@simonwoods ... you have my attention.

@vasta @ChrisJWilson This was my process:

• Look for episode of podcast in my app.
• Can't find it.
• Look on the website for the podcast.
• Find the episode, now let's put it into the app.
• Oh, I'll have to download it since there is no browser->app method for this.
• Oh... Safari doesn't have an obvious way for downloading this file?
• Welp there I go, using Chrome on my desktop Windows machine.

... this is absolute crap, especially for a medium full of opinionated developers and designers who can't wait to sell their matresses against a tirade against a big tech company.

Now maybe I've missed that there's an obvious place for this, maybe somebody already made Pdcstr and my declarations are short-sighted nonsense. However! I could not find such a solution easily and there is certainly nothing I have seen that gets shared about by said podcasting types of people.

So I think this should be a thing. More than a directory, an acutal place where you can get download links -- or at least links to where the links themselves are genuinely accessible -- for every podcast. This shouldn't be a problem for such a celebrated open medium.

@simonwoods like @Chrisjwilson I use huffduffer and like @vasta I use Castro ands it’s Sideloader iOS extension. Between them I can get most single episodes into Castro. Huffduffer also lets you get YouTube videos(and other services) as audio.

@simonwoods I think part of the problem here is that podcasting as a whole is not concieved of as “playing one-off audio” (like the audio player apps of old), but rather as subscribing to an entire series of audio episodes (like reading blog posts via RSS, since, well, podcasts are blog posts via RSS, just with audio attachments…). The entire ecosystem (producers, hosters, player developers) all operate under this shared understanding of how podcasts “work”.

So there’s no standardized way to indicate “this is the URL for the audio file for just this episode/associated with this post” in HTML or anything other than the the RSS <item> for the post…. Granted none of this helps you in any way, but perhaps it explains why it is so hard to do whay you want and there are no tools for that?

FWIW, my method of listening to a one-off episode of the podcast is to find it in Apple Podcasts (or give it the podcast feed URL, for things not listed there), don’t subscribe, and just click the + next to the episode I want to hear.

@smokey @simonwoods I find that many larger podcasters are using third party platforms for hosting and distributing their podcasts. Many of these often use JavaScript trickery to hide the actual audio file of their episodes. Along with Cory Doctorow, I've complained about this before. There's a link in there with a Cory tweetstorm that has some cluse for how to find mp3 files for podcasts using iTunes.

Others have recommended one of my favorite tools: Huffduffer. It's got a couple useful bookmarklets that will help to find audio files as well as Ryan Barrett's Huffduff-Video bookmarklet.

Another service I like is Listen Notes, which has a podcast search functionality and will point you directly to RSS feeds which will also uncover audio files a bit more easily.

I found many of these to help create faux-casts on my own website of things I've listened to.

@c @smokey @johnjohnston @vasta @ChrisJWilson Thanks for the notes and the suggestions! I always forget about Huffduffer.

For the curious: the podcast was Core Intuition and the app was Overcast.