Adding podcasts manually to macOS and iPhones

Aka. hacking around Apple’s bullshit

30 Aug '20

In Apple’s infinite wisdom with macOS Catalina and the mess of apps previously known as iTunes, you can no longer add podcasts manually. You can only subscribe to RSS feeds. This is bullshit and unacceptable to me. Still, what am I going to do? Start using Android and deal with that security clusterfuck and two years of updates at best?

But wait, if you can subscribe to RSS feeds… why not create one?

After writing the feed by hand and using Python’s simple HTTP server for a proof of concept, it seemed to work. So in under 250 lines, I was able to create Pod Local Sync. This makes it easy to manage the feed and add new episodes.

I hope it’s useful to someone else. I should probably move to a different workflow and podcast app, but this is a convenient enough solution for now.

Python, macOS

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