Whenever I discover a podcast to listen to, it seems like they go out of their way on the website to prevent you from sorting from oldest to newest (which seems to me the logical way you would want to start listening to a podcast). Why is that? Surely it wouldn’t be that difficult to implement, would it?
I can only speak in the case of the ones I was inolved in: The earliest episodes were really rough, and it took a few at least to find our collective stride. So if you started from the better quality ones and got hooked on that, then you might go trawling through the archives. If you started from the first episode, you might (rightfully) get turned off by its relatively poor quality.
Lots of reasons I can think of:
Podcasts are still considered ephemera like news shows.
Sponsors change and only your current episodes hawk the product that’s currently paying the bills.
Podcasters are often embarrassed by their early performances.
Early podcasts may be hoarded for the day they can be paywalled or reserved for paying (Patreon) subscribers.
How are you listening to podcasts? Do you use some web-based player? Podcasts are generally published as RSS and there are lots of things that can read that and present it to you however you want to see it.
I listen to them in an app called Overcast (which I recommend). It has a toggle in the settings to sort podcasts from oldest to newest (and several other options), and also has per-podcast controls in case you want to listen to most in that order but, say, a news-related podcast newest first.
I agree that the very earliest episodes of many podcasts are often not very good.
One problem can be that the feeds have limited lengths.
But mostly it’s just that the web interfaces are designed for casual listening. If you want to listen to the whole back catalog, they expect you to use a podcast app. Mine has no problem sorting things in chronological order.
The feed itself is in reverse chronological order, though, so any feed limits mean the older episodes get removed first.
Yes, I mostly listen to podcasts while I’m working on the computer by using whatever player is embedded in the website for the podcast.
Sometimes it’s not too bad navigating to the first episode, but sometimes I have to scroll down on some B.S. infinite scrolling web page for what seems like an eternity.
If I could hijack this thread with a related question that probably doesn’t justify its own…
I have a couple of Patreon subscriptions that provide a private RSS URL so you can easily add them to your standard podcast app. PocketCast on iOS in my case.
That’s just fine for the episodic podcast-like subscriptions. But one of them is a release vehicle for a musician’s songs. I’d very much like to just play all the songs as if they were an album: a similar use case to Apple Music for example. Just hit a button to play the album or jump around to specific songs without having to add each one to a “up next” queue that removes them once heard, etc.
Does anyone know of a podcast app that supports that or have some alternative suggestion?
Some podcasts I listen to are set up to allow people to listen to the current episode for free. Subscription via Patreon allows access to the back catalogue.
The Complete Guide To Everything is one podcast like this, and is worth every penny.
Sort of. Podcasts are just mp3s, so you can download them and then load them into your music app. I have a Windows podcast app called gPodder that just downloads the files and you can do whatever with them.
I haven’t found an iOS app that does the thing that you (and I) both want, which is to treat a particular podcast like it’s just an album, and not remove them after playing.
That’s the app I use. As far as I can tell, you can sort oldest-to-newest or newest-to-oldest. But what you can NOT do is get it to automatically download the next episode in an oldest-to-newest sort order. So if I find a podcast I like that has a hundred episodes already, I have to go in and manually click download on all of them, but then once I have it will play it in order.
Super frustrating. It seems like such an obvious feature.
True. That is annoying. I guess I haven’t started a new podcast in a while.
That reminds me: there was one podcast I was listening to (on a website) that would automatically play the next episode once the current episode was finished. Unfortunately since the list of episodes was from newest to oldest, “next” meant “previous episode chronologically” which I found rather useless.
I figured out which podcast I was remembering: Cautionary Tales, by Tim Harford.
Speaking as someone who still uses an ancient MP3 player, there are several Podcasts I have found that are not downloadable. I had no idea there was an app to remedy that. It seemed to be controlled by the hosting site of the Podcast.
Can you give me an example?
Generally, a podcast is an RSS feed, which is just a formatted list of urls of sound files with metadata like album art and episode notes. For a player to play it, it has to download the files.
I suppose someone could put up some weird website with a list of audio things you can play through the website only and call it a podcast, but it wouldn’t work in any normal podcast player.
The one I was thinking of was a board game podcast. Their hosting site didn’t allow downloads as best as I could tell and when I contacted them they told me they knew of no way of doing so. Perhaps we should not have phrased what I said that way but I figured if there is one; there is more.
For some podcasts and ads they can totally edit in new current to download ads. Generally they’re the ones not read by the podcast and are only at the end/beginning of the episode. I think some podcasts from bigger companies or organizations also have middle of episode edits to the ads.(IE Slate)
Either way there are ways they can keep ads up to date. From downloading a batch of old episodes and getting time relevant ads, I’ve noticed.
What’s the site?
By the way, I’ve noticed that Stitcher allows you to easily sort podcasts by oldest to newest, so that’s my preferred site now.
Over a year after I started this thread and this still annoys me. Even worse is when each episode in the list is represented by a giant picture so that you can only get 2 or 4 episodes on a page before having to click a link to show older episodes!
Am I really the only person in the universe who defaults to listening to a podcast in chronological order?