Ask HN: Best way to search and collect platform-agnostic podcast links?
I'm looking to introduce my parents to some podcasts I've been listening to in an effort to expand their minds and stave off their inevitable senility (kidding [kinda]).
I listen with the terrible Apple Podcasts app (open to suggestions here too), but my parents use Google and so I'm not going to link them to the Itunes page.
However, I can't seem to find a good search engine that will allow me to search "Philosophize This!" and get back links that they can use to subscribe and start listening easily.
Does such a service exist, or is there a better approach I can use?
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[ 48.6 ms ] story [ 1501 ms ] thread"Audiosear.ch is a one-stop search and recommendation engine for podcasts. We transcribe, timestamp, tag, cluster, and collect ratings and reviews for thousands of shows."
I just tried a search for "Philosophize This!" and it did indeed find some episodes, and you can even play them right on the page.
Early this year, I was hoping someone could build a very basic podacast search engine that allowed me to search the whole internet's podcast episodes -- searching meta data is good enough; no fancy AI needed. I didn't want to subscribe yet another podcast -- I've subscribed to way too many podcasts already... I wanted to find episodes, listen, then move on.
Of course, I couldn't find such podcast search engine, so I built Listen Notes. The first prototype of Listen Notes was indeed a "I can build this in a weekend" type side project :)
free app available, though it's iOS only. Syncs with web version though.
an annoying misfeature I have noticed with a lot of podcasts is that the feed URL only includes the latest N (usually 100) episodes, and if you want to listen from the beginning you have to do so "by hand" by visiting each episode's web page and either downloading the episode or listening in the browser. For one podcast with a predictable URL format for episodes, I pieced together an .xml file by hand that referred to all the episodes. It was super janky but I was able to pretend that it was the actual podcast's URL just fine.
In order to subscribe, you just click on the + button.
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It will create a link that will subscribe them on their chosen podcast app on Android. If they haven't chosen an app yet, it will provide them a list of options.
Hope that helps.
However, copying RSS feed links is a pretty terrible way to discover content. Most normal people want a search or recommendation engine of some kind (you liked x, you will probably love y), which is why virtually every podcast app offers access to searching some kind of RSS feed database of podcasts within the app.
If you were to go with your approach, I'd personally still consider using iTunes as the search engine for the RSS urls, most podcast app makers seem to agree Apple's database is pretty much the most complete out there, probably largely by dint of being the first to really focus on building a database of these feeds.
As to format: virtually every podcast feed in existence is constant bitrate MP3 (confirmed by several different podcast directory maintainers), so this isn't really a concern. There are various technical reasons why historically podcasts have had to avoid VBR/other audio formats. CBR MP3 is guaranteed to playback without issue on almost anything, including your car stereo from 10 years ago.
https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/i...
http://itunes.so-nik.com/
https://gist.github.com/christophermoura/d02370349c9f06e597f...
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...
https://gpoddernet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/clients.htm...
nonetheless it looks like there are some possibly decent curation / search features, certainly better than the apple podcasts app / itunes.
It's not free (pay once per platform, including web app), but worth it to me because I'm a podcast junkie. I was using it on Android for a year, switched to iPhone, and all my subscriptions are there.
I switch back and forth between the web app and iOS frequently, and it syncs across them.
One of the nice things about it is it will sync episode progress across devices, so if you pause on one app, you can resume playback on another.
The ability to quickly scroll through unfinished episodes was the killer feature that others are lacking. I listen to different podcasts depending on what I'm doing (running, cooking, preparing to sleep, etc), and all other apps, at best, required several clicks to find an unfinished episode from the previous day.
Its interface takes a little getting used to, and search results don't always hit (which I view to be a matter of the sources searched, rather than the app).
That said, it's a quite solid app. And free of crap-ware.
AntennaPod supports the two ways I want to add a podcast: search and by url. Haven't run into the problem of it not finding anything either (but if I did, I agree that it's not the app's fault).
Recommend it 100%.