Listenbox is Cool

When I wrote this post about switching away from Castro to embrace the Apple Podcasts app, I mentioned that one feature I was leaving behind was sideloading YouTube videos as podcast episodes. Castro did that as a simple Share Menu option, though my milage varied on how often it would work without multiple tries.

I’ve found that Listenbox is a great way to mimic this functionality while using Apple Podcasts as my player. The premise is simply that it will let you add YouTube videos as podcast episodes. It offers more if you want to subscribe to a paid plan, but my use case needs nothing other than the free option.

From any YouTube video, copy/share the URL and plug it in on the homepage of Listenbox. Once you click Listen, it will provide you with an audio or video version of the YouTube video with buttons to “subscribe” in Apple Podcasts and a slew of other popular podcast apps. Once you tap the player of your choice, it will open the “show” and you can follow/subscribe to get the episode in your queue for listening. That’s it.

The one paid feature that is enticing for how I use the service is a “Listen Later” queue where you could load as many YouTube videos as you’d like and still get a single feed to subscribe to in your podcast app. The only extra effort I have with my free tier method is that occassionally I go into the Shows section of Apple Podcasts and unfollow the shows, since there will only ever be one episode (that corresponds to the video I wanted to podcast-ify).

While ~$50/year may seem reasonable, I am not using any of the other paid features so the Listen Later single feed isn’t worth it to me. Maybe the developers will add an option that only enables that feature for a lower price.

This service reminds me a ton of the awesome Huffduffer. I still use my Huffduffer feed from time to time, but it doesn’t work well with YouTube videos since they aren’t an audio file natively. I wish Huffduffer would support transcoding YouTube videos to mp3 format natively, but I doubt it will get that enhancement.

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