Show HN: I Made an iOS Podcast Player with Racket

I don&#x27;t know if this is a good place for feature requests, but the only thing keeping me from switching to this at at the moment is download settings per podcast.<p>For example, some podcasts I don&#x27;t want to miss an episode and I want them all downloaded. Other podcasts I only check in on occasionally and would only want the latest episode to be kept on device.<p>I subscribe to a lot of podcast and downloading and keeping every episode is going to eat up a lot of storage.<p>Besides that, love the simplicity of it. Well done!

&quot;Boost voices&quot; is a cool feature a lot of apps have, but what is really needed is a &quot;compress voices&quot; feature. So many podcasters speak loudly 75% of the time, but then trail off randomly or almost whisper. Then you turn it up and they&#x27;re projecting loudly again and blow your ears out. It&#x27;s especially annoying in the car trying to compete with road noise.

For those of unfamiliar with Racket, could you go over what it takes to run a Racket app on iOS?

I support a number of podcast creators on Patreon, and apparently they’ll (at some stage) allow creators to have multiple RSS feeds. Until then, I’d love to be able to regex match on titles for download. This one creator I follow has about 6-7 different shows on the same feed, but I only listen to 2 of them.<p>I’ve been a Pocket Casts users since I can remember. I’ll +1 the CarPlay support that you mention was already on your list. The other, which they’ve recently introduced, is to disable Lock Screen scrubbing. Been a life saver!<p>Looks great though! I’ll keep an eye on the change long as it evolves.

Just want to say, I love the design of your website!

&gt; <i>It&#x27;s also free, has no ads or tracking, and it&#x27;s local-first except for the podcast directory and sync.</i><p>The app privacy label says it tracks diagnostics.

Well done; will test and possibly switch. But, for me more importantly, using Racket for this is more really nice. Thanks for that.

I’m getting an error going to the Discover tab and also when hitting “search” after typing a search term (newlines added):<p><pre><code> string::1: bytes-&gt;jsexpr: bad input starting #&quot;error code: 502&quot; context..: ...&#x2F;syntax&#x2F;readerr.rkt:15:2: -raise- read-error ...&#x2F;private&#x2F;arrow-val-first.rkt:486:18 ...&#x2F;private&#x2F;backend.rkt:45:9: get-trending-podcasts ...&#x2F;noise-serde-lib&#x2F;backend.rkt:69:22</code></pre>

The app looks really good! Based on the title I thought it’d be something you made most as a testbed for Racket so I was surprised to see the app itself actually looks great :D<p>I tried looking through your blog but couldn’t find anything except the 40 minute YouTube video for your other app. It sounds like both the UI and the audio-related code are in Swift? What code ends up actually being in Racket then?

Racket has been on my bucket list of languages to learn. Seems really intriguing

This is great! I just switched over from Overcast. Very nice and simple interface, no clutter, and not a ton of unnecessary features. Love it.

Looks cool! If I may, a couple of feature suggestions:<p>1. You mentioned it already but bookmarks. In particular bookmarks that can be added through iOS Shortcuts (so we can each build whatever crazy automation we need) and that can be exported (so we can keep LARPing productivity in our Obsidian vaults).<p>2. An &quot;undo&quot; function, somehow. I know this is weird but I&#x27;ve misclicked the seek bar so many times (esp. in the lock screen) and lost where I was... a solution for that would be so cool.<p>I&#x27;ve been using the same podcasts app for... well over 10 years. But yours looks really cool, I may just switch.

I will definitely check it out. I&#x27;ve never done iOS development but I have been considering doing this very thing as a way to learn and to give myself the podcast player I really want. :) Good luck!

Any plans to implement podcast 2.0 features like boosts or sat streaming?

Can it handle feeds that aren&#x27;t available on the public internet?<p>I have a personal feed that I can connect to over TailScale. But I&#x27;ve found that most podcast clients have a server-side component, which means their backend server must be able to access the feed.<p>I tried adding my private feed to Podcatcher and am getting &quot;Server Error (500)&quot;.

Cool thanks! (I also realized I&#x27;m not the only one who loves listening to podcasts during the shower eheh)

Where does one learn how to interface with the podcast directories? Who provides free downloads? I had heard something about rss at one point.<p>Couldn’t find a good app for phosh and was thinking of writing one.

Good job! If you need episode search, check out PodcastAPI.com

Four things that matter to me in a podcast app<p>- Privacy<p>- OPML support<p>- Ability to import from Apple Podcast<p>- Dark theme

Looks very nice.<p>I see Windbreaker Podcast featured in those screenshots on the App Store listing. A Z̶e̶r̶o̶ ̶P̶u̶n̶c̶t̶u̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ Fully Ramblomatic fan?

Really cool! Now if you can make an osX version, and also add the radios like &quot;Receiver Radio&quot; it would be perfect :)

Bug report: go to Discover, serach for Mike Duncan, tap on Revolutions, exception pops up

Not usable at all on iOS 18.2. Error popup when try to add any podcast.

Doesn&#x27;t work! Clicking discover just shows a messagebox with a stack trace[1] - so I have no way of adding a podcast to try out the app.<p>[1] Error string::1: bytes-&gt;jsexpr: bad input starting #&quot;error code: 502&quot; context..: ...&#x2F;syntax&#x2F;readerr.rkt:15:2: -raise- read-error ..&#x2F;private&#x2F;arrow-val-first.rkt:486:18 ...&#x2F;private&#x2F;backend.rkt:45:9: get-trending-podcasts ...&#x2F;noise-serde-lib&#x2F;backend.rkt:69:22

Does it work with CarPlay?

feedback: it&#x27;s slow (clicking on subscribe, etc)

kudos well done! looks really cool

i cant download it? cant find it

I did not use this app yet, but I want to share my issue with the current native podcast player in iOS.<p>Some podcasts are news related and require hearing the latest episode. Other podcasts are more serial like history narrations and require hearing the series in the order it appears. Download options should be reflective of these two functions. And &quot;play next&quot; should also be reflective of these two functions.<p>Some podcasts have fast speakers and need to be slowed down. Other podcasts have slow speakers and need to be sped up. The speed setting should be saved per podcast.<p>New View: A play next queue list should be present. Swipe right to play. Swipe left for other options<p>Condensed View: Upon expanding an episode, swipe left to see other episodes in the list ordered by date based on preference. Scroll down to see options for the episode. Scroll up to see other episodes in Queue.