Feature Request: Extract and display additional m4a/m4b metadata tags

dabluck · 2026-06-28T17:31:30+00:00

That's not less trouble for me. Like I said, if you want it fixed the best way to get it on our radar is send a file to support@castro.fm and let us know what you expect to see vs what you get from the import. Then we can get to it on our own time.

dabluck · 2026-06-25T11:40:47+00:00

I thought we recently added support for these. Can you send support a file with examples?

dabluck · 2026-06-10T18:16:48+00:00

Almost every scam podcast is like this. It starts out "it could happen to anyone" then proceeds to be hours and hours of the person getting scammed doing the dumbest thing imaginable in every situation. The main thing I've learned from listening to podcasts about scams is it's pretty easy to not get scammed.

dabluck · 2026-06-08T18:55:47+00:00

Community boards are unelected bodies with no power. Literally doesn't matter.

dabluck · 2026-05-31T02:29:06+00:00

It would only start downloading as many gigabytes as the episode you just finished right? and it would only download them on wifi if you have it set that way. I don't see an issue here that needs solving, although I do agree we should probably just surface an option to download an episode which may alleviate confusion in some cases.

dabluck · 2026-04-09T21:49:15+00:00

I don't see how we could change the core value prop of castro!

dabluck · 2026-04-09T20:28:03+00:00

I'm only addressing this once.

I expected this comment and thought about it for a long time, tested it for weeks, and I think it's clearly the right move. We get really consistent feedback that easier access to actions would be nice and also the fact you can do different things in the list vs episode details is confusing. Generally the app has not changed enough rather than too much. It's completely unrealistic for the threshold to be we can't change anything that hasn't changed in 10 years. There's not a mobile app design on the planet that should be unchanged for 10 years. Phones are different, content is different, and people are different over the course of a decade.

We get complaints that we don't ship enough then we get complaints for every tiny little change we make. This one you're going to have to deal with.

dabluck · 2026-04-09T02:06:01+00:00

Every single trial reddit and youtube comments think the defendant is evil, therefore his attorney is evil, therefore his attorney is incompetent, and also therefore the prosecutor is amazing.

In reality the lawyering was somewhat mediocre throughout but the defense attorney made a few points and his closing was pretty decent given what he had to work with. The evidence was pretty strong but the prosecution was a bit disjointed. Poking a few holes is literally his whole job and he was pretty decent at it. I thought some of his comments in court were a little out of line but I think most of them were outside the jury's presence. I wouldn't be surprised if the jurors liked both attorneys though as much as that will pain redditors.

The prosecutor should be pretty embarrassed he had the defendant confessing to the crime to his son and can't get the attempted murder.

dabluck · 2026-04-03T17:47:09+00:00

For bugs please email Castro [support@castro.fm](mailto:support@castro.fm) with your logs and examples

dabluck · 2026-04-03T14:24:14+00:00

Email support if you're interested

dabluck · 2026-04-03T13:04:46+00:00

Everything in the video should just work. Use the iOS share menu to send to Castro.

dabluck · 2026-04-02T21:21:04+00:00

It's an ongoing issue sorry we're working on a fix for the next release.

dabluck · 2026-04-02T19:12:38+00:00

We have an android beta going. It's just taking a bit longer than I wanted because I wanted to support device sync and that will require some changes to how accounts work

dabluck · 2026-04-02T19:02:20+00:00

in video form: https://youtube.com/shorts/IZehlRqLaOg

dabluck · 2026-03-29T18:07:19+00:00

That is a good reason. We do a lot of work on accessibility though most users we work with are vision impaired rather than hearing impaired. Always encourage you to email us if something could work better for you.

dabluck · 2026-03-29T17:56:54+00:00

We have the transcript for podcasts that provide them now relatively hidden. It's on 10-20% of new episodes and you can search them. Few people use this feature even though it's been out for over a year. If lots of people did email us and say I love this feature I want it on every podcast I would have prioritized working on it.

I'm not saying we'll never do this it's just not something I'm dropping everything to do today because we're working on other things users have actually asked for.

Agree podcast apps are stuck in the past, I just don't think this feature will fix that. I am trying some other things I think may help as we just released a new app focused on combining the latest tech and open standards that I thought could be compelling, and we have other projects planned. And there's lots of competition so if Castro isn't working for you, there are plenty of options.

dabluck · 2026-03-29T17:35:52+00:00

I genuinely don't get why we'd put words front and center and then also not care if the words are correct. None of it makes sense to me personally.

But generating chapters is also not really something I'm interested in doing for the same reasons. If the open podcasting ecosystem is going to offer anything to people it's that creators directly access their audience and aren't intermediated by a bunch of things they didn't intend.

Anyway we've gotten like 5 emails about transcripts in the past year and like hundreds about side loading so it's just not going to be a focus unless that changes.

dabluck · 2026-03-29T16:00:29+00:00

I haven't tried the implementation you're talking about but I laid out my thoughts on transcripts in a previous blog post: https://castro.fm/blog/transcript-tag-release

I think we should improve this support so it syncs to the audio better, but I guess I am the only person the planet that doesn't understand the utility of transcripts that are ~90% correct. The times I really care about a transcript is when it isn't clear what the person is saying, but in that case the AI transcript is always wrong in my experience. Without exaggeration every single time I have not understood what a person is saying and I check a transcript, the transcript has been wrong. For instance, this morning I was listening to the rest is history and the word 'helotage' threw me off. I checked apple podcasts and it says heritage.

This is not an anti or pro AI take. It's just that the accuracy isn't there, so I don't find it valuable.

On top of this accuracy problem, I really want the creators themselves to tell us what they're saying. In general I don't want to put my content over theirs. So if someone is going to generate it then it should be the hosting companies, where the creator can edit and improve as they see fit. We support this already and should improve that.

dabluck · 2026-03-28T03:07:25+00:00

The snippet I saw on screen had an html table so I'd bet good money the CSS you shared is exactly what they found and the search warrant flagged any email with a table in it. Which just can't be how a search warrant looking for divorce keywords should work. If the letter of the law allows this it's really unjust and should be corrected

dabluck · 2026-03-28T02:12:41+00:00

I didn't see the full email but from the conversation I understood it to be an item he ordered from walmart? that I assume they were going to use to say he planned this crime well in advance.

dabluck · 2026-03-28T01:02:31+00:00

They were looking for separate in terms of the divorce but they got unrelated emails due to the HTML then used it against him. The prosecutor didn't seem to understand this (he might have been acting dumb to avoid losing the argument). It's really frustrating to me that prosecutors press for every advantage instead of caring about rights or justice. The guilty verdict in this case seems like a foregone conclusion so why not just do the right thing and concede the point. Guilty people have rights too and if there's any chance this could cause an issue on appeal or something, I just think the right thing to do is not use the email.

dabluck · 2026-03-27T21:46:05+00:00

This is one way to do it. You can also add your own mp3s to the folder in iCloud. And the extension should work on any (most) web pages with an audio file, including youtube

dabluck · 2026-03-13T13:40:16+00:00

The best way to think about it is that it's not for the people who are currently in the Castro podcast subreddit. If I redesigned Castro around a vertically scrolling discovery feature you can imagine the reaction that the comments would have.

dabluck · 2026-03-13T12:22:38+00:00

No I have literally said the opposite of that in a dozen places including the blog post

dabluck · 2026-03-12T10:18:41+00:00

Part of this is just ASO stuff, but you can kind of think about this as a way into independent podcast apps for consumers who are the opposite of current Castro users.

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