Using M3 as a podcast player
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This is not a formal guide, merely a collection of observations. As pointed out by @derDay and @tarquin, the feed reader in M3 already has builtin podcast support. Let’s take a look at how to get this going.
Links, links, links
The first order of operations is finding a suitable feed link for the desired podcast. This is also the hardest part, because M3 won’t work with a regular Apple or Google Podcasts link, we need to find an RSS feed. Following a couple of examples.
Easy
💞The website for the podcast already has a feed that is being detected by Vivaldi.
https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-daily
Click on the feed icon in the address field and on preview (this might take a while to load), check the contents then subscribe, we’re done.
Medium
⚔️The website has a feed, but it’s incomplete.
https://www.theguardian.com/podcasts
We want to subscribe to the “Football Weekly” podcast (don’t ask me why, it puzzles🧩 me) and therefore visit https://www.theguardian.com/football/series/footballweekly. The feed is being recognized by Vivaldi and we can therefore click on the icon in the address field, but the feed is incomplete. Only the last four entries are being retrieved. This can be cumbersome, if we want to subscribe to a podcast that is a complete series and we can’t access the first episode. Going back to the initial site we notice the “Today in Focus” podcast features an RSS link (https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/todayinfocus/podcast.xml). This link is different from the “Football Weekly” one accessed by Vivaldi (https://www.theguardian.com/football/series/footballweekly/rss). The site is trying to trick us into using an Apple or Google podcast link, because the RSS feed link doesn’t exist for other podcasts. Or does it? Trying https://www.theguardian.com/football/series/footballweekly/podcast.xml works out fine and we can subscribe to the podcast directly. (Notice
/rssvs/podcast.xml!)Hardcore
💀The website has no usable feed.
https://www.gammabeyond.com/podcast/
This is an example of a podcast, which recently featured our supreme leader. There is an RSS icon in the address field, but the feed is incomplete. Even worse: After subscribing to the podcast we notice the absence of the audio player in the feed items. it’s unusable.
We gotta find a working feed and I found that the third party site Player FM is helpful in this regard. We can search for a podcast on top right and are being presented with both a website and feed link (https://player.fm/series/innovational-correctness). Clicking the feed link lets us subscribe https://feeds.simplecast.com/js1K6nkR.
I should note that this specific podcast didn’t exist on Player FM previously, which complicates things even more. At the bottom of the search results you can click a link: “Is there a show we don't have in our catalog? You can add it here.” For this to work, you need to first create an account and then visit the link again. Then you can input any valid Apple Podcasts link and Player FM will retrieve the show and present you with a feed link, which can be used to subscribe with M3.
Playing podcasts
It’s as easy as opening the feed item for an episode and clicking the play button. You should first create a standalone tab by double‐clicking the feed item, or else you won’t be able to use the rest of M3 while the podcast is playing (it resets upon navigating away). It doesn’t hurt to pin the tab either.
Currently moving the playing tab to a new window, simulating a browser restart, or changing the theme will all reset your podcast, because the UI is being redrawn. Don’t trigger any of these actions while you’re listening and you will be fine. Maybe disable scheduled themes (hint).
I hope these tips have been helpful. I’m using M3 as a podcast player for less than a week and I’m sure I missed some things. Please share your own experiences, or use this topic to ask for help. Especially finding feed links can be tricky.
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A few additional observations, concerning operation, bugs and possible feature requests.
After starting playback a three dot menu appears on the player, containing a menu item for downloading the podcast. This does nothing for me, tested on Linux only (
VB-76260).We can tab through the player elements to access the timeline(?), this lets us skip back and forth by 15 seconds using arrow keys. Pretty handy, because doing this with mouse is inaccurate and rough. Maybe expanding the player horizontally wouldn’t hurt either, at least when being hovered. Being able to input a time by hand to jump to it and buttons for skipping, would be awesome extras.
There is no way to mute the playing tab. Keyboard shortcuts don’t work and there is neither a speaker icon in the tab header, nor a corresponding entry in the context menu. “Muting other tabs” has no influence either. It’s likely because M3 is not a regular webpage, but I don’t see why this shouldn’t work. It would also be neat to get a toggle for stopping and resuming playback optional in the tab’s context menu.
