I’ve been listening to podcasts for over 20 years. The entire time, my collection has been subscribed, and managed within Apple’s iTunes.
No longer.
Podcasting is a medium under threat from a number of assailants:
- Advertising agencies and “Podcast Networks” using Dynamic Ad Insertion: Advertising has shifted to “zero effort” pre-recorded ads, that are geotagged and invasively targeted to the listener. It’s a worse version of commercial radio advertising.
I was listening to a recent episode of a show on the “i heart radio” network (fetch my vomit bucket), and it had (if I recall) eight 30 second pre-recorded ads in a single break.
Prior to this development, podcast advertising was almost exclusively sponsor reads by the hosts of the show – you could enjoy listening to them, because the hosts would bring their own charm to the commercial. Now you’re listening to a (typically) American or British show, and you suddenly get a broad Australian (in my case) accent pitching you McDonalds, or coal-fired power. So now, I skip ads reflexively. - Independent Podcast Applications trying to do both too much, and too little: Every podcatcher & podcast player I’ve found so far, that run on Mac and iOS, are loaded up with recommendation garbage and show discovery, but won’t actually provide a competent interface or methodology for managing a locally-stored podcast collection*.
- They all seem to presume that either no one collects podcasts, treating them as ephemerally as radio, or that everyone burns down their entire back-catalogue collection every time they change application, and just re-downloads everything from scratch. Every app features OPML export to migrate the feeds between apps, but no one provides a mechanism to migrate the downloaded episode library.
- If you have files that aren’t attached to a feed, they’re effectively inaccessible, because none of the apps (from my experience) will let you just point to a directory full of files, and treat that as a show.
- There’s also the sheer idiocy of using cloud services to sync the actual episode files themselves, tens or hundreds of megabytes in size, rather than just direct transferring them between devices. I think there has to be something profoundly wrong with you, if you think the way to move data a foot across a desk, is to round-trip it via a server on the other side of the world.
- Apple: As the big dog in podcasting (though I note with significant schadenfreude that Spotify has apparently dethroned them), Apple is attempting to pivot from simply providing good applications, and a directory of shows, to selling subscription-based premium podcast feeds (and providing a mediocre podcast application).
To that end, Apple has stymied access to the location where Podcasts.app on the Mac downloads its files; using randomised strings for names of files and directories, therefore removing human readability. Worse still, it’s enforced location is on the boot drive – something that can’t be upgraded on almost all Macs, and for which Apple typically charges approximately four times the industry norm, per gigabyte**.
This comes after years of streaming-oriented changes to podcasts in iTunes, which made the process of keeping your files safe from auto-deletion more and more uncertain. It eventually required manually saving every single file, OR accepting a risk that if a feed moved and reposted its back catalogue to a new server, or changed the naming scheme for back catalogue files, iTunes would download the entire back catalogue again.
*Which excludes Overcast, because its entire basis is you rent space on Overcast’s servers, and store your collection there. However, I don’t build my archive plans on how long a single developer remains interested in continuing an app or business, nor on the volatility of server rental.
**I’ll note with some bitter irony that Mac OS X used to have human-readable plain text XML for all preference files, but they’ve been largely replaced with binary encoded versions that require a dedicated application to decode, and this regressive change was justified as saving disk space. Sure Apple, we’ll save a few megabytes so you can cheap out on the SSDs you put in machines, which you’ll fill to the brim with podcast files we used to keep on external drives.
So to hell with Apple.
Where to from here? Well, I’ve started by:
- Manually copying all my podcast back catalogue episodes out of my old iTunes Music directory, into a new Podcast Archive: Everything there is organised in human-readable simple directory structures, with a folder for each show, and every episode in the appropriate place.
To deal with shows which have changed server, or changed their “album artist” or “artist” ID3 tags (which is what determines the name of the show / feed within the Podcasts.app), I’ve used a tag editor (MP3tag) to align all the previous episodes to the show nomenclature of the newest episodes.
For mass file renaming, to match the name schema of new downloads (because iTunes used to do strange things to filenames when saving podcast downloads), I’ve used Name Mangler.
For cases where the date created and modified of files are out of order, I’ve used A Better Finder Attributes to adjust things so that Finder’s view of the episodes can, by sorting as a list, reflect their original feed order. - Setting up a new podcatcher application: Doughnut – an open source podcatcher and player. It’s still relatively early in development, and seems to have become somewhat dormant, but it’s a workable, basic application that has no frivolous show discovery or non-core functionality. I’ve set up all my subscriptions in Doughnut that were previously active in iTunes. Doughnut downloads new episodes automatically to disk, but that doesn’t solve keeping them in my new Podcast Archive, since it can’t display existing files on disk – it only knows about things it has downloaded.
- Transferring downloads to the Podcast Archive: Once Doughnut downloads a file, Hazel (a system automation tool) copies the file to the corresponding directory in the Podcast Archive.
The setup for this is pretty simple. In Hazel, I configure every folder Doughnut created for each subscribed show as an automated folder. I add an automation to each that has the rules; “File was created in the last 5 minutes”, and “move to (the Podcast Archive folder for that show)”. You could achieve this with the system’s built-in Folder Actions, or Shortcuts, etc.
The nifty thing about this is that since both the Doughnut directory structure, and the Podcast Archive are on the same logical APFS volume, the copy doesn’t use any more space – the two files are just references to the same thing, but behave as if they’re independent objects. Another advantage of this is if Doughnut has an issue, like randomly deleting files, it’s only acting on its downloaded copies, not your actual Podcast Archive. This of it as air-gapping your collection from the podcatcher. - Viewing the Podcast Archive: While I can just browse my files in Finder, in any of the traditional views, what if I wanted a more holistic overview of all my shows in the archive, in a single list, ordered by date? Remember Spotlight Finder searching, and Smart Folders / Saved Searches? A bunch of wonderful technologies that have sat, undercooked without full GUI support sine Apple bought Siri and realigned the company around the idiotic notion that a server on the other side of the world was the best way to search for things on your computer. What we do, is:
- navigate to the root directory of the Podcast Archive
- in the search field at the top of the Finder window, type a single space character. This non-discoverable and unintuitive action will bring up the GUI options for crafting your search criteria.
- hit the plus sign
- set up Kind, as Document, and then hit plus again
- set Date Modified as however far back you want the list to show, if you want to limit the list; the last month, for example.
- Save your search (I keep saved searches specific to a volume on the root level of that volume) and choose to add it to the Finder sidebar, because that makes it available for use in open / save dialogue boxes (normally, Smart Folders can’t be accessed through an open / save file browser).
- Syncing to iPhone: Here we come to iMazing, which has the ability to copy files from Finder, directly into the Podcasts.app on your iOS device, without having to go the whole Finder sync procedure.
A word of caution; one of the goals of this process was to completely cut Apple out of my podcast life. When you install / first launch Apple’s Podcasts.app on iOS, it defaults to iCloud enabled, and downloads all your podcast subscription records from your iCloud account in the background before you interact with it. It is VERY hard to get rid of this once it’s in the app, so an important step within iTunes (or the Podcasts.app on Mac) is to:- Manually unsubscribe from every show to which you’re subscribed (and give that a few minutes to propagate to iCloud).
- Switch off iCloud podcast sync on your Mac.
- THEN delete Podcasts.app from your iPhone, nuking all its data with it.
- Reinstall Podcasts.app on your iPhone, it should then load with an empty library because iCloud has no data for it.
- Disable iCloud Sync in the settings app for Podcasts.
- Now you’re ready to copy files with iMazing. One thing – you may encounter a bug where Podcast artwork isn’t copied across. As of mid-September, iMazing is aware of it, and are working on a fix.
And there you have it – you are now effectively back to the way things were when Podcasts were subscribed to in iTunes, and synced to an iPod. You lose a couple of things, like play counts, and synced playhead positions. However, iMazing’s drag & drop podcast loading (for which you can use your super-handy Smart Folders as your source) is a better workflow than the original iTunes sync. You also gain the ability to edit your podcast files (so those 10 year old adds for Lootcrate…) without worrying about breaking feed continuity.