About podnod

What it is

podnod indexes public podcast feeds and gives you somewhere good to listen to them. As of Today the catalogue held 161,035 shows and 3,887,147 episodes, refreshed automatically from the publishers’ own RSS.

Everything on this site is also in the app: the same charts, the same show pages, the same episode notes. The player runs in this browser tab with nothing to install, and there are native apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android when you want one — the downloads page says what has been published for each. They are the same app, not a companion and a real version.

Listening

A queue, playback speed, a sleep timer that fades out rather than cutting the audio dead, and your position kept per episode. Episodes download for offline listening on every platform, the browser included, and new episodes of shows you follow can be fetched automatically — off until you ask for it, then held under a storage cap you set and suspended on a metered connection if you say so.

Where a publisher ships a transcript or chapters, podnod fetches them once, stores them as text and serves them itself — so reading along with an episode does not tell its publisher that you did. Where a feed carries a video rendition as well as audio, the episode can be watched instead of heard; audio stays the default and the switch is yours.

One account, or none

Without an account everything still works: your subscriptions, queue, positions, downloads and settings live in a database on your own device, and nothing about what you listen to leaves it.

Signing in adds one thing — a copy on the server, so your other devices can see it. Subscriptions, the queue and where you are in it, saved episodes and playlists follow every device you sign in on. Downloaded audio does not: it is a file on a disk, and the disk it is on is the device that fetched it. Signing in for the first time merges what you already had rather than replacing it.

Signed in on more than one device, each one shows what the others are playing, and takes it over with one press — same second, same queue, same speed. The device you took it from stops. You can turn that off, and turning it off stops it at the server as well as on the device.

What it is not

• It is not a host. podnod never stores or re-serves episode media — audio and video stream straight from the publisher’s URL, so their analytics and their download counts stay theirs. Artwork, transcripts and chapters are the exception, and they are cached here so the publisher’s server is not hit once per listener.
• It is not exclusive. Every show here is a public RSS feed. Nothing is locked to podnod and nothing is taken out of anyone else’s app. Your subscriptions export as OPML whenever you want them.
• It is not an advertising business. There are no trackers on this site, no ad slots in the player, and no shelf anywhere is assembled from your history. Privacy says exactly what is stored and how to get rid of it.

How the catalogue is built

Feeds are fetched on a schedule derived from how often each show actually publishes — the median gap between its last ten episodes, clamped between fifteen minutes and a day. Show notes are sanitised to a strict allowlist before they are stored, and the links inside them are extracted into a real list so they can be tapped rather than hunted for.

The charts are computed hourly. Popularity blends subscriber count with plays over the last thirty days; trending compares the last seven days to the seven before, damped by volume so a show cannot trend off a handful of events; new & noteworthy is any show whose first episode landed in the last four months. Each chart’s standings are recorded at the start of every week, so a show can say which way it has moved rather than only where it sits.

Those figures are podnod’s own listeners, and on a young catalogue that is a ranking computed over almost nothing. Until enough shows here carry real signal, the public podcast indexes’ own chart positions lead and podnod’s numbers break the ties; past that point it is the other way round. A position more than a fortnight old is ignored entirely — where a show stood six weeks ago is not a fact about today.

If a show is missing, add its feed. No account is needed and it does not have to be your show.

Publishers

Artwork, titles, descriptions and media belong to the people who made them. If you publish a show listed here and want it corrected or removed, the feed’s own metadata is the fastest route — podnod re-reads it automatically — and removal requests are honoured.