How best to merge free and paid feeds?
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I don’t think the issue I’m describing is a Pocket Casts specific one, but this is the player I’m using so I’m asking here:
A few times now, I’ve subscribed to a podcast and get a private feed for add free/bonus episodes, etc.
So now I’ve got the public feed and which episodes I’ve played, or not, and the new paid feed which is totally unread.
It would be great if I could convince Pocket Casts to sync the status somehow.
Also, if I (well, not “me”, but many paid subscribers) unsubscribe from the public feed, that lowers the public feed’s stats. So I end up keeping both subscribed anyway (I just put the old one in a folder which ignore).
What are some ways y’all handle this?
Is there a trick within Pocket Casts to make this better?
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Thanks for raising this – it’s a common pain point for listeners who support podcasts through paid subscriptions!
Unfortunately, merging the playback status between a free and a paid feed isn’t something Pocket Casts is able to do automatically. The core reason is that podcast authors typically assign different episode IDs to their free and paid versions of the same episode. Even if the content is largely the same, these are treated as entirely separate episodes from a technical standpoint, so there’s no reliable way for the app to know they correspond to one another.
On top of that, free episodes frequently have ads inserted by the author (dynamically or baked in), which means the audio itself can differ from the paid ad-free version, further reinforcing why they carry distinct identifiers.
Your current workaround of keeping both subscriptions but tucking the public feed into a folder you ignore is actually a reasonable approach for now. We appreciate the feedback though – the underlying request (syncing listen status across related feeds) is something worth noting as a feature idea for the team to consider down the road.
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Thanks for the reply.
As a paid user of Pocket Casts, I can use the web and found that opening each feed in a separate window lets me compare side by side, and archive the episodes in the newly aded feed.
Perhaps the app could let me create a view of all episodes from two feeds in chronological order, so I could scroll through both at once and manually archive the duplicates.
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Perhaps the app could let me create a view of all episodes from two feeds in chronological order, so I could scroll through both at once and manually archive the duplicates.
Something like this could be accomplished with a Smart Playlist.
You could create a Smart Playlist and configure its rules to show episodes from the two podcasts. Once it’s created, you can tap on the three dot menu in the upper-right and change it’s sort order to “Oldest to newest” or “Newest to oldest”.
But if that doesn’t quite accomplish what you were looking for, please let us know!
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This is certainly on the right track.
I’d need the “smart rules” to have an option to display “archived” (unless there’s another way)
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I’d need the “smart rules” to have an option to display “archived” (unless there’s another way)
Ah, I see. That is a limitation of Smart Playlists at the moment. I’ll forward this case along to our development team as a feature request for that.
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