Basically if you have feedback you’d like to send and are not on github here is the better place as comments in the Jolla store don’t create notifications (OpenRepos does).
If you have a bug and can take the time to actually file it on GitHub that would be hugely appreciated, this topic is to lower the barrier of sending feedback/feature requests/bugs.
On github the project lives here:
Many thanks to thp who started gPodder and all the contributors!
I use Gpodder on a daily basis. So thank you so much for Gpodder on Sailfish OS !
My main problem is that I’m a big fan of a podcast that I’ve been downloading since 2015! If my phone hadn’t been stolen and if I’d been more diligent about saving, I’d have all the episodes (one a day, except weekends and except July and August). To date, this represents 2983 items and almost 22GB of data on the µSD card, taking into account the symbolic link I made to avoid cluttering up the phone’s memory. The theft of my phone cost me a year, but now the podcast offers, in addition to today’s episode, the episode from 10 years ago. This means I can now download 2 episodes a day, and if this continues, I’ll eventually get back the year I lost when my phone was stolen 
Of course I have a dozen other podcasts that I also follow but don’t necessarily download every day. The harbour-org.gpodder.sailfish folder totals 24 GB (I’m rounding).
Now Gpodder is very, very slow at “mounting” all the podcasts before it can synchronize the episode updates. I don’t know if there’s a way to improve this.
I can open a bug on Github if you think it makes sense
DeepL.com (free version) help me to write this post
Can I say that is the strangest podcast I ever heard of, daily episodes that are only available that day, wow.
But maybe I’m just sheltered.
As for load times, if you want you can add an issue, I’m not sure there is a lot we can do because when gpodder starts it scans all the files that are in the folder so a huge collection like you describe would be slower to read.
Not sure if downloads are sheltered from tracker, but scanning 22Gb on every app start does sound bit ridiculous, if they are maybe a simple find on compatible file extensions would be quicker (and accept some broken downloads and 0 byte files make the list), if not just query that, if starting gallery app would scan hundreds(thousands?) of photos each time…
I can confirm the slowness of gpodder. Starting the app takes up to a minute before you can use the app. I have quite some podcast, but i do not understand why it is that slow… It would be nice to have some profiling data so one can see where all the time is lost, so the problem can be addressed. Otherwise changing the storage structure may be an option (away from flat files to SQLite).
Another problem for me is the playback speed. 0.25 step for is not optimal. i would prefer to have 0.1 steps, so i can control the speed more fine grained, and i am also not sure if there is anybody that listens to podcast with more than twice the original speed. Even a speed of 0.5 seems dubios to me (range from 1.0 to 2.0, should be sufficient, i guess)
Also from me: Thanks a lot for maintaining gPodder. I enjoy the new discrete steps of playback speed.
Start-up time used to be rather long on my XA2, however it’s totally acceptable for me on X10iii.
There are two issues that bother me for a long time:
When gPodder finishes playback of one podcast and switches to a new track it rather often crashes. I haven’t figured out any deterministic rule for that. It may be due to switching audio decoders. I realised that when you continue listening to a track it first starts for a few samples from the start of the track with playback speed factor of 1 and then jumps to the position where it stopped before and also changes play back speed.
The second issue is that it sometimes does not start with the playback speed you selected before, sometimes it helps to jump 10s, sometimes you need to manually adjust the playback speed.
I only listen to podcasts via bluetooth headset, so those issues may be related to Bluetooth, however, I haven’t seen these issues on other audio players.
Hey thanks for all the great feedback!
I probably did not describe things well enough, my basic understanding (I have not touched the code interacting with local storage a lot) is that the backend is actually SQLite, the files are scanned to determine which podcasts have been downloaded and are available on the local filesystem, an episode that was previously marked as downloaded that is not found changes status to deleted, I don’t think that the scan is more in depth than paths and file exists yes/no, I will try to see if I can dive into that part of the code in the not too distant future.
As for the playback speed issues I also experience them but it is as far as I can tell something in the underlying media framework of SFOS and I don’t know that I can fix them (as far as I know other applications that use the builtin player and offer speed adjust have the same issues).
Playback speed range - personally I sometime do go above 2, I never go below 1 but I basically offered the low threshold that most online players offer, if there is no demand for that I am totally fine changing it.
Playback increments and range - I’ll add a poll here.
What should be the playback speed increment size?
0 voters
What should be the lower end of the playback speed range
0 voters
I’ll close the poll on May the 4th 2024 (May the force be with you ;)).
I used gPodder for a long time and something made me switch (back) to Podqast, and I can’t remember what… maybe it’ll come to me. But Podqast isn’t without quirks, either, so.
Anyhow.
I think I’m one of the very few people on this planet who like to listen to (most) podcasts at 0.9 speed. This results in a relaxing slowdown that does not make the voices sound weird.
I voted accordingly in your poll above.
I’ve been using gPodder for about 6 months. I thought I’d been downloading episodes via WiFi so that I could listen to without using data. However when I play the episode data is being used.
How do you download to be able to listen off line?
You tap an episode and have some icons. Second one is a cloud with a down arrow which is the download icon.
Which is what I do however looking at my data usage even though I’ve downloaded episodes over WiFi they appear to be downloading again in real time while they are being listened to. The reason I say this is my data usage has skyrocketed since I started using gPodder.
A successfully downloaded episode would have a thick vertical line/rectangle on the side of the screen furthest from the podcast cover (right for LTR, left for RTL) in a theme colour, the only thing that is supposed to be downloaded “live” if you are using a downloaded episode is the episode art, when we added support for episode art it originally downloaded to the device immediately but that ate too much storage for people so we switched to just downloading it when it is used.
Yes, the downloaded episodes have the vertical line.
How much data in the episode art? Perhaps that’s the cause of my high data usage. I download at home to listen in the car.
It depends on the podcast, some have really high quality heavy art work and some have just a tiny thumbnail or nothing.
Is there a way to stop downloading the art work?
Not at this time but it’s something that has been asked before and I need to see if/how I want to do this as a setting, maybe per podcast of app wide.
Another option would be to download episode art when the episode is downloaded.
The episode art may not be my problem. I’m trying to nail down the cause of my extremely high data usage which started coincidentally at the same time I started listening to podcasts on my phone.
Right now I have to think my high data usage problem is related to podcasts whether it be episode art or something else.
In my opinion, the big “feature” that should be present in gPodder would be to no longer have to make the symbolic link for files to be saved on the µSD card: ideally, I’d like there to be a button suggesting where to save the files.
Where does gPodder save the downloaded episodes? I cannot find them anywhere?