Thing 17: A Better Podcast Function for Sonos

I love my Sonos: almost immediately after you get it, it starts to feel like a natural feature that all living spaces should have. But it handles podcasts so, so badly--unnecessarily badly. It pretends that we're all listening to radio shows, so the only portal to the podcast world is RadioTime. RadioTime has a middling-to-OK catalog but no better, and the Sonos/RadioTime interface does an incredibly poor job of using the functionality of podcasts.

Thing seventeen-A: I want an RSS-like list of new episodes, across all feeds. Right now, the easiest way to do that is to look at the BeyondPod episode listings on my phone, then search for those shows and add them to the playlist. This is unutterably stupid.

Thing seventeen-B: I want to be able to subscribe to audio feeds using their URL.

Thing seventeen-C: I want to be able to see the episode notes, or at least the full title! The truncated titles means that quite often, all you can see of an episode is "A Podcast Named George: Ver" where the full title is "A Podcast Named George: Versimilitude in Geology". Some podcasts have longer titles than others, so for some, you can't even see the full title and get nothing at all of the topic. Since many podcasts don't put dates in their titles, it's not easy to figure out the date, either.

Thing seventeen-D: I want to be able to import and export my list of subscribed podcasts. Lots of podcatchers are using OPML to allow for this, so it's not a hard problem--it just needs an intake mechanism.

There are probably other features that I want, but a podcast area of the Sonos with these four would go a long way. Adding Stitcher (which is supposed to make a continuous "radio station" out of your podcast subscriptions) could have gone a long way, if it weren't for Stitcher's terrible implementation and problematic advertising & distribution policies, which keep some shows I like from signing up.

I know there are behind-the-scenes plumbing and approach problems with some of these requests, but I can't imagine they're really all that hard to solve. Podcasts are a major component of the audio I listen to, and the lack of an intelligently-designed podcast arena in Sonos is a serious drawback for me.

Thing 4: Podcast Subscription Syncing

I listen to a lot of podcasts, on a lot of different hardware. I use Radiotime via our Sonos system (which I do love dearly, in general), I use Stitcher both in the Sonos and in my Nexus S, and I also use Google Listen because it has different queueing & offline capabilities than Stitcher. I set these three systems up at different times, so I subscribe to a slightly different list depending on what I was thinking about at the time I set each system up (science! pop culture! storytelling!).

So this is the Thing That Should Exist is: a way to export, import and/or sync lists of podcasts across all these different platforms. At the moment, there's no good way to make sure RadioTime, Stitcher, and Google Listen all have the same list.

This should not be so hard. Come on, universe, get on that!