A real RSS feed, not a playlist
What Feedcast produces is an ordinary podcast feed, the same XML a hosting company would publish. Episodes arrive in your app with their titles, artwork, show notes, dates, seasons, episode numbers, chapters, transcripts and media files, because those are the tags a podcast feed carries and Feedcast fills them all in.
That is the entire trick, and it is why nothing else has to change. Your player has no idea it is talking to a Mac in your living room rather than a CDN, so queues, downloads, playback speed, position syncing across devices, sleep timers, CarPlay and Apple Watch all keep working exactly as they did.
Two halves: the listing and the files
It helps to keep these apart, because Feedcast treats them differently.
The listing is a small text file that says which episodes exist and where each one can be fetched. The episodes are the audio and video, and they are large. Feedcast serves both from a small web server inside the app.
Most podcast apps, Overcast, Pocket Casts and Castro among them, fetch feeds from their own servers, and those servers cannot see inside your network. So Feedcast publishes the listing to an unlisted address at feeds.feedcast.org by default, for the three free feeds too, while the episodes it points at still come from your Mac. Apple Podcasts and a few others can also read the listing straight from your Mac. Choose Local Only for a feed if you want its listing to stay on your Mac as well. That is the whole of what goes online: the list, never the audio.
The consequence: your phone downloads a new episode while it can reach your Mac. At home that means the same network. Away from home, enter your Mac’s Tailscale name in Settings and your phone can fetch episodes from anywhere. A laptop is fine, and once an episode is downloaded it plays anywhere.
The feed is personal and unlisted rather than published. It carries the tag that asks podcast directories to leave it out, and there is no password on it, so treat the address the way you would treat any link you would rather not hand around.
Build it around how you listen
A feed does not have to be one show. Put the three interview podcasts you actually finish into a single feed, add a lecture series from YouTube and the talks you saved to your desktop, and subscribe to that one address. A feed holds as many shows and episodes as you want to give it: the free limit is three feeds, not three subscriptions. A show can move to another feed from its right-click menu, and new episodes follow it there.
Each feed gets its own title, artwork, description, category and language. Give the artwork a coloured frame and the feed stands apart from the original show in your podcast app. Filters skip episodes whose title has a word you name, and cut chapters by their title, like Intro or Trailer. Premium lifts the three-feed limit and adds OPML import, which is how a long subscription list gets in without any typing.
Moving to a new Mac does not mean subscribing again. Back up your library in Settings, restore it on the new Mac, and your podcast app keeps the same feed addresses while the episodes download again where they are still available. Shortcuts and Siri can add a show, check for new episodes or hand you a feed’s link.
Improve the episode on the way through
A personal feed can do more than move files around. On the way into it, Feedcast transcribes the episode on your Mac, keeps or writes its chapters, cuts out the sponsor reads it finds, and with Premium shortens long pauses and evens out the volume. What lands in your player is the better version.
Read how the podcast ad blocker works, what happens with transcripts and chapters, or how to turn YouTube into a podcast feed.