On Podcast Clients

As a podcast fan, I subscribed to a bunch of wonderful channels. For news, there's BBC News, Up First of NPR, World Story of the Day, Today in Focus, The Daily of New York Times, Chinese News of NHK, On the Media of WNYC, etc. For current affairs commentary, there're The Foreign Affairs Interview, The Political Scene of New Yorker, bumingbai.net, cdt.media, Sinica, China Insider, The NPR Politics Podcast, BBC Documentary, etc. Other categories include movies and songs commentary, science and technology, storytelling, games, language learning, etc.

On Android, AntennaPod and Google Podcast are the most used. On Linux, gPodder is a good choice. As open-source software, it downloads all episodes as MP3 files, which can be synced to a local folder easily. It works well in WSL, thanks to the excellent job done by the WLS team of MS. MP3 exporting is particularly important in China mainland, for many of the channels are blocked and only be shared with files rather than links. The command-line version of gPodder (`gpo`) can even be deployed on a remote headless server. However, I found `gpo` is buggy for now, with many 5xx errors when retrieving podcast lists. gPodder is written in Python. As coming to v3.12, the language is evolving more and more powerful and elegant. Many language features, as well as tooling improvements, such as type annotation, pipx, poetry/pdm, make it an ideal language for not only data science but daily used applications.

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