Can someone please make this app to help with Podcasts?

[jacg]

Please can someone make an app that checks the date and running time of the currently playing podcast, goes into the cache folder, finds the correct file, copies it somewhere and renames it with the proper name?

Then I can keep it, add it to Music, play it to multiple speakers (without relying on AirFoil), control playback via the Remote.app, etc.

 

[cdcastillo]

I don't understand what it is you want to achieve. Can you elaborate?

 

[jacg]

You used to be able to easily find podcast mp3s for storage or editing, but Big Sur makes this much harder. I just wanted to automate the rather tricky process it has become.

 

[darkpaw]

The OP is saying that the older versions of the Podcasts app was much better than the current one, in respect to saving podcast episodes. Sometimes, episodes are removed, so you can't listen to them again unless you've saved them somewhere.

You used to be able to download the episode, then simply drag it onto your desktop. This copied it from the cache folder in the library, leaving it available to play both through the Podcasts app and separately.

I used to do this a LOT. It was easy.

Now, you have to open:
/Users/darkpaw/Library/Group\ Containers/<random_chars>.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache
and manually figure out which file is the episode you're looking for. You just see a list of UUIDs. Some of the files will have an icon, but that just shows the podcast, not the specific episode.

It's a fresh hell that Apple didn't need to create.

I've decided the way forward is to delete a download via the Podcasts app, open the cache folder, then download the specific episode again. It's manual and annoying, but the latest file will be the one you're looking for.

To the OP, send some feedback to Apple. At the very least they should restore drag & drop functionality.

 

[BrianBaughn]

You might research the "Podcast Archiver" app (App Store, $2.99) to see if it will do what you want.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Could this be some form of 'DRM' they are working on? Making it hard to find the files *would* help protect content from providers.

OR...

It's just lazy programmers that didn't want the overhead of providing that level of 'management' for the files. It has to be some level of resource use to pull it off. Now, they don't. Just a guess...

 

[darkpaw]

It's just lazy programmers that didn't want the overhead of providing that level of 'management' for the files. It has to be some level of resource use to pull it off. Now, they don't. Just a guess...

But the feature was there before. The app knows where the file lives because if you delete it, it can't find it and lets you re-download it. All they've done is remove functionality that existed before and that could easily exist again. It's literally just letting you drag and drop an episode out of the app. All that is is an action to copy a file it knows about to the destination. That's very little coding.