Much better Podcast support

[Audacity]

I'd like to be able to listen to my Podcasts in a scheduled fashion, probably using alarms. But I'd like the alarm function to be able to have some simple logic that it will play the most recent episode in from the RSS feed.

For example, at 10am I'd like to play "The World in Brief" from the Economist, and I'd like it to play whatever the most recent episode on that RSS feed. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to create a schedule of various podcast shows in such a way that I'm essentially creating a talk radio station with a selection of all my favourites. That would be a interesting way to use WiiM streamers/speakers.

I'm not sure if this would be easier to do using existing music services that happen to integrate Podcasts (e.g. Spotify), or if it's worth WiiM writing their own podcast player code. I think the latter might ultimately be better than the former for many reasons because you'd have way more flexibility on what you'd be able to do, and as a software dev myself it doesn't seem to be difficult to do in relative terms. Primarily because podcasts all want you to fetch their content, the RSS feed interface is public/standard, it's not like licensed streaming services which try and prevent 3rd party apps from accessing their content because it's all behind a mandatory paywall due to content licensing. Also importantly: there are a lot of open source podcast apps "out there" (e.g. PocketCasts, my "daily driver" podcast app happens to be open source).

 

[slartibartfast]

Indeed, I previously had a Sonos setup and I used to schedule TuneIn radio stations in my office via alarms at certain times when a radio show I like is scheduled. This was the TWIT podcast network when they had a scheduled daily show (Tech News Today) and I'd listen to it live, and I've done this for years. I could do the same with WiiM.
But TWIT was the exception where they maintained a "live" feed. Most podcasts don't have live scheduled showtimes, they just push out new episodes when they're ready. This is why I'd really like is to pick a podcast that I like which comes out regularly, and then at a scheduled time have WiiM play the latest episode in the podcast feed. Or even better, I can pick my top favorite podcasts and then at the alarm time, make a playlist of whatever is new and then play that playlist. This would be difficult/annoying to write the code for if you're going to integrate with other intermediate services, but if you simply make your own Podcast software that reads RSS feeds directly? That trivializes the problem.

To all the people who are saying that features for Podcasts/Audiobooks aren't important and what really matters is esoteric HiFi, all that tells me is that you have no idea just how big Podcasts are. For every person who cares about "EQ regain", there are probably between a thousand and ten thousand people who care about listening to podcasts.

EQ regain is probably more important for odcasts

 

[castalla]

I'd like to be able to listen to my Podcasts in a scheduled fashion, probably using alarms. But I'd like the alarm function to be able to have some simple logic that it will play the most recent episode in from the RSS feed.

For example, at 10am I'd like to play "The World in Brief" from the Economist, and I'd like it to play whatever the most recent episode on that RSS feed. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to create a schedule of various podcast shows in such a way that I'm essentially creating a talk radio station with a selection of all my favourites. That would be a interesting way to use WiiM streamers/speakers.

I'm not sure if this would be easier to do using existing music services that happen to integrate Podcasts (e.g. Spotify), or if it's worth WiiM writing their own podcast player code. I think the latter might ultimately be better than the former for many reasons because you'd have way more flexibility on what you'd be able to do, and as a software dev myself it doesn't seem to be difficult to do in relative terms. Primarily because podcasts all want you to fetch their content, the RSS feed interface is public/standard, it's not like licensed streaming services which try and prevent 3rd party apps from accessing their content because it's all behind a mandatory paywall due to content licensing. Also importantly: there are a lot of open source podcast apps "out there" (e.g. PocketCasts, my "daily driver" podcast app happens to be open source).

Have a look at Audials. It's a great radio/podcast app. Has lots of features, including recording. Maybe it could be useful. It also has EQ

There's also Lyrion (LMS) music server, which does podcasts & alarms, playlists - maybe you could get some mileage out of that.