PodTracer is a simple web-based podcast player built as a learning project during my time at the Recurse Center.
Why another podcast player? Mostly I wanted a testbed for experimenting with local-first user data and decentralized sync technologies. A podcast player is something that (1) I can legitimately use while (2) not being too sad when I mess up and have to reset the data store.
It also gave me a way to get more familiar with React hooks and web media player APIs, and to generally see how far I could get without a server component.
You can try it for yourself via hosted versions on Vercel or Fission.
You should consider this an unsupported toy project. The biggest limitation is that due to CORS restrictions, client javascript code can't request most podcast/RSS feeds from other servers, so PodTracer comes with some hardcoded feed content to test with.
As a fairly basic React app, PodTracer can be run locally via yarn start and built for production with yarn build as usual.
PodTracer uses IndexedDB to persist your list of shows and playback state in your browers. When you first run it on a particular device, the list will be empty. Click one of the + Add... buttons to add some sample episodes, then click one of them to play. The play progress and speed setting for each episode should be preserved even after reloading the page.
There is one obscure way to add arbitrary episodes (or any audio file) to your browser's playback queue right now. To do this, create a url e.g.
https://podtracer.vercel.app/
?addepaudio=(the URL of the MP3 file, URL-encoded)
&addeptitle=(the title of the episode, URL-encoded)
&addepimage=(the URL of the episode image, URL-encoded)
&addepguid=(the GUID of the episode, URL-encoded, OPTIONAL)
&appepsourcetitle=(the title of the podcast/source, URL-encoded, OPTIONAL)
For example, this link adds an episode of the Computing Up podcast to the Vercel-hosted version of PodTracer.
