Podcasts files in MacOS Catalina

[icymountain]

I like to archive some podcasts and notice that the new Podcast app in MacOS Catalina seems to make this unnecessarily hard.

The files are now stored in some obscure Library subdirectory, and not in Music anymore. This is not ideal, but ok (one just needs to locate them the first time).

However, what is more annoying, is that file names now consist of some sort of meaningless hash codes (not sure which hash is used, but I see file names using only hexadecimal digits). This defeats the purpose of any classification (outside of the Podcast app which seems to use some kind of internal dictionary).

Is there a standard and clean way to export the podcasts to files, with meaningful names ?

 

[NoBoMac]

Is there a standard and clean way to export the podcasts to files, with meaningful names ?

Sorry for the delay: just stumbled onto this post.

Short answer, no, nothing clean.

Sorta in the same boat. I've been moving podcasts to an external drive once a week, to not waste SSD space with somewhat inert data (I'm backlogged on my non-daily podcasts and only have 256GB). I've been moving the podcasts as is re: name and putting in a symbolic link to the external copy in the local library. I then copy over X number of podcasts from external, as is, and drag/drop into a 3rd party iPhone app to listen to them (Vox is nice, but using Readdle Documents). The 3rd party players display the names/titles/episode information correctly in the apps and lock screen.

You could dump the Podcasts database to extract the episode title of the podcast, but would need to do some character mapping to make a legit file name, and to make it not too long.

For example, here is some code to extract that information from the database:

Spoiler: Podcast Dump Code

db_path="$HOME/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Documents/MTLibrary.sqlite"
/usr/bin/sqlite3 <<EOF
.open "$db_path"
.headers off
.output /tmp/PodDump.txt
select zuuid,ztitle from zmtepisode where zasseturl <> '';
.quit
EOF

And here is a snippet of what you would see.

Spoiler: Podcast Dump Example

79F255C4-A16C-4F7F-B67F-24B02E819E1E|Episode 1040 - Kurt Andersen
FC13F623-98C0-4586-9804-71E0739C50EB|Episode 1010 - Christina Hendricks
4F9E8EDA-5D27-4734-BAB4-0A851873FB2C|In The Heat Of The Night
E7D93605-942C-4A19-A7D1-D40B6E7A6EC7|Toy Story

If comfortable with shell script and related commands (awk, grep, sed, tr, etc), can automate this. Or, simply can dump the database and use grep to find the entry for the file and manually rename?

 

[icymountain]

Short answer, no, nothing clean. [...]

Thanks a lot!
First of all, the confirmation that this is quite messy is very useful.
Second, I did not know where the database actually is and how to access it, this is very useful information. I just checked the output and get some information about the pod-casts, but not the right information (e.g., radio program title and date). Maybe there are other fields in the database. I have to get a bit more familiar with this. I never accessed directly sql bases, but very used to programming, so I hope I will manage. Sounds like one of the (many) projects I could invest time in while confined inside my home, as many people on this planet right now. Thanks again for the very informative and detailed post.

 

[NoBoMac]

There are a number of date fields, but have not been able to decode what it exactly represents (not "since Unix day one", SQL date functions do not return anything logical).

To see everything (all records, all fields w/column names), remove the ".headers off" and replace the select statement with ".dump zmtepisode".

EDIT: really late with this, but putting out there in case someone stumbles upon this.

Figured out what the date fields are: seconds since MacOS day-one, 01/01/2001. To convert into human readable, use the *nix command "date" after adjusting value with seconds since *nix day-one (01/01/1970).

Spoiler: Decode code

# Unix seconds since day-one to MacOS day-one
usecs=978307200

# March 14, 2022 in MacOS since day-one value

msecs=668934060

date -r $(($usecs+$msecs)) "+%Y%m%d%H%M"

# output: 202203140001

 

[icymountain]

Many thanks.
This is a lot of data for sure. I will look carefully into this.

 

[jacg]

This is one of the reasons I forked my itunes library. I run Music for music and iTunes for podcasts and internet radio. And both these apps can use Airplay speakers and be controlled via their dock icon or the iOS remote app.

 

[Thilus]

So if I got your problem right you want to export the Podcasts as a file from the podcast app. It is actually possible to drag and drop them out of the app to get an m4a file which should work fine.

The other way around seems to be much harder. Manually importing Podcasts which do not originate from an RSS feed. I do have some old episodes of a podcast lying around. It looks like this import function is not there anymore and I need to make a locale RSS feed to send them in my podcasts app. Looks like a lot of work but I do not know how to solve this in another way.

 

[ysuee]

Is there a better app than the native podcast app? I'm in the same boat as the OP and ended up reverting back to 10.14 because archiving is now a mess in 10.15.

 

[icymountain]

So if I got your problem right you want to export the Podcasts as a file from the podcast app. It is actually possible to drag and drop them out of the app to get an m4a file which should work fine.

The other way around seems to be much harder. Manually importing Podcasts which do not originate from an RSS feed. I do have some old episodes of a podcast lying around. It looks like this import function is not there anymore and I need to make a locale RSS feed to send them in my podcasts app. Looks like a lot of work but I do not know how to solve this in another way.

Thanks, but my problem is slightly different. I would like to export the podcasts AND retain some sort of logical naming and sorting that used to exist with iTunes (with directories).

At the moment, I am playing with the database (a big thank to NoBoMac for pointing me to it), and I have some hope to make it work. I have started to recognize most of the fields that I need, and with some more effort I should be able to implement some small automatic crawler that goes into the Podcasts App's database, and exports the files in a nice way.

Is there a better app than the native podcast app? I'm in the same boat as the OP and ended up reverting back to 10.14 because archiving is now a mess in 10.15.

I searched, but did not find any.
And yes, this is *one* of the factors that make me still use 10.14 (essentially, when a new MacOS gets released, I install it on an older laptop to see how it works out, and I roll it on my everyday machines only when I am fully satisfied).

 

[poohbear666]

iMac OS Catalina 10.15.4
iPhone SE iOS 13.4.1

Sorry, jumping in with a slightly different issue but this is the first place I've found with sensible comments regarding Catalina and podcasts

I'm having similar problems with podcasts, specifically syncing from the iMac to the iPhone:

1. All my podcasts have remained in the old iTunes media folder, as well as being copied into some weird library folder with hashed file names. So, when I sync, I discovered, finally, that the files in the old iTunes media folder were being assigned to the Music app on the iPhone - I had wondered for some time why a lot more memory was suddenly being used on my iPhone!

2. Podcasts seem to sync OK from the iMac to the iPhone, except, they won't play! I get the message 'Unable to play. Try again later.'

3. I iTunes, I used to be able to go straight from a podcast in iTunes to the file in the Finder - not available any more in the Podcasts app :-(

4. It also seems to be the case that when I do a sync from the iMac to the iPhone all podcasts and audiobooks are sync, even if nothing has changed!

It seems syncing between a Catalina iMac and an iPhone has been completely screwed up!

 

[LizKat]

MacOS Catalina 10.15.5
Podcast app


Sure seems like a half-baked Podcast app that has no "Add to Library" feature.

I want to be able to play some previously downloaded and retained video podcasts (via Mojave, iTunes) in a Catalina app that is a sucessor to iTunes (Podcasts, TV, Music).

Can't figure out where to put them or how to make any of those three Catalina apps want to recognize them.​

The files are are .mv4 files and they do play ok QuickTime Player but that's an awkward workaround.​

Failing that, how complicated it is just to ditch the Music setup and give Retroactive a try w/ itunes 12.9.x from my other laptop's main iTunes setup? I am not a fan of the TV app either since I can't get it to show me my purchased TV and Movie files separately and in list view. EDIT: and a column browser was nice in iTunes view options when looking at tv and movies...

Is is possible to have both a Music and a Retroactive iTunes setups (different ones) on a machine running Catalina?

 

[ysuee]

Is there a better app than the native podcast app? I'm in the same boat as the OP and ended up reverting back to 10.14 because archiving is now a mess in 10.15.

I like to archive some podcasts and notice that the new Podcast app in MacOS Catalina seems to make this unnecessarily hard.

The files are now stored in some obscure Library subdirectory, and not in Music anymore. This is not ideal, but ok (one just needs to locate them the first time).

However, what is more annoying, is that file names now consist of some sort of meaningless hash codes (not sure which hash is used, but I see file names using only hexadecimal digits). This defeats the purpose of any classification (outside of the Podcast app which seems to use some kind of internal dictionary).

Is there a standard and clean way to export the podcasts to files, with meaningful names ?

So I thought I'd follow up to this string. I just found a solution to my podcast problems (and hopefully this will help others).

I wanted the benefits of Big Sur (OS 11) with the features of iTunes. It turns out, you can install iTunes to Big Sur with the help of software called "Retroactive". It's free and it made installing iTunes a breeze.

Link here: https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive

I have zero affiliation with the site or author, and stumbled upon this after mulling over my options.

So now my Apple laptops/desktops have the advantage of having the latest OS, and I can still archive my podcasts to an external drive.

Thought I'd share. Thx

 

[mrmz]

I like to archive some podcasts and notice that the new Podcast app in MacOS Catalina seems to make this unnecessarily hard.

The files are now stored in some obscure Library subdirectory, and not in Music anymore. This is not ideal, but ok (one just needs to locate them the first time).

However, what is more annoying, is that file names now consist of some sort of meaningless hash codes (not sure which hash is used, but I see file names using only hexadecimal digits). This defeats the purpose of any classification (outside of the Podcast app which seems to use some kind of internal dictionary).

Is there a standard and clean way to export the podcasts to files, with meaningful names ?

I had the impression that by importing your podcast files into Music, the system (here, the Music application) creates again the kind of folders and lists you (and most of us) are used to, that is, using words we can understand. It did work on my machine.

This being said, Apple's design choices are sometimes quite weird and contrary to its initial philosophy (taking the users' habits and needs into account). Personally, I feel more and more straightjacket.

 

[icymountain]

I had the impression that by importing your podcast files into Music, the system (here, the Music application) creates again the kind of folders and lists you (and most of us) are used to, that is, using words we can understand. It did work on my machine.

This being said, Apple's design choices are sometimes quite weird and contrary to its initial philosophy (taking the users' habits and needs into account). Personally, I feel more and more straightjacket.

Unfortunately, the impression described in the first paragraph is incorrect, but the very last word of your post ("straightjacket") is perfectly adequate.

The new process is to give each of your files a cryptographic hash as a name (a meaningless sequence of '0'-'9' and 'a'-'f' characters) and let a database contain the correct mapping, so that you never manage to access your files using anything else but the Podcast app.

As far as I am concerned, I wrote a program that to sort out the mess and copy my files in a separate place after extracting the required info out of the database.

 

[mrmz]

Unfortunately, the impression described in the first paragraph is incorrect, but the very last word of your post ("straightjacket") is perfectly adequate.

The new process is to give each of your files a cryptographic hash as a name (a meaningless sequence of '0'-'9' and 'a'-'f' characters) and let a database contain the correct mapping, so that you never manage to access your files using anything else but the Podcast app.

As far as I am concerned, I wrote a program that to sort out the mess and copy my files in a separate place after extracting the required info out of the database.

I append a screen dump, showing the result I get on my machine after importing the files into Music. I've noted though, that some of the files don't get imported, but most do. This being said, many thanks for your feedback.