Podcasts in cliamp

cliamp is a terminal music player written in Go, with more than four thousand stars on GitHub. It isn't my project. Over a few days in September I sent it five pull requests, all merged, that make podcast episodes seekable, remember where you stopped in each one, and let you browse the shows you subscribe to.

Episodes that played like live radio

Podcast episodes played as if they were live streams. The header read LIVE, seeking did nothing, and a seek sent over the player's IPC interface reported success without moving. The cause was the choice of pipeline: everything fetched over HTTP went down the streaming path. A response with a finite length and none of the headers internet radio sends is a file, not a broadcast, so it now goes to the buffered FFmpeg pipeline, which can seek. The episode's length comes from the feed until the download finishes, then from ffprobe, because feeds understate it. Without FFmpeg installed, nothing changes.

Remembering where you were

The podcast provider kept no state, so every episode started from the top. It now stores listening position and played state per episode in a local file, and the track list marks played and part-heard episodes. Most of the work was in the edge cases: an episode that loses its metadata mid-play, a CDN that rewrites episode URLs, same-titled episodes with no GUID (told apart by publication date), and a progress file written by a newer version of cliamp. That last one used to be read as far as possible and rewritten in the older format, quietly dropping whatever the newer version had stored. Now it's left untouched and saving is skipped for the session.

The other two are smaller. Saved playlists can be appended to the one that's playing, and the queue gets a view of its own. The visualizer remembers its mode between launches and can hide the episode title, since the full-screen view is the one most likely to be on a shared screen.