I’m not too sure - I’m not too familiar with any of these services (including PinePods 😂). I know this type of feature is a common request for any audio related services though. I imagine that this is something that could be added at some point, but I’m not sure what the effort would be.

I don’t see anything about it on the roadmap for v1 or anywhere else on Pinepods’ issues. Perhaps the developer/maintainer @madeofpendletonwool@lemmy.world can chime in or an issue on Github can be created with more information about this feature request?

The biggest benefits are likely:

• Single service for all your podcasting needs (ie: searching, storing, playing, tracking, and syncing podcasts + listening history)
• Multi-device, cross-platform support (I know this can be somewhat accomplished through the process that you mentioned, but you would need separate apps for iOS and desktop/web)
• (speculation/assumption) It may be easier to get newer features added to Pinepods (especially those that you or the community contributes and/or for server-related features) since the project is focused on just podcasts
• I’m not aware of a similar all-in-one podcast server + client service. As Pinepods matures, it can offer features/services that may not be easily included in the services you mentioned. For example, searching by transcript across all downloaded podcasts or summarizing/combining multiple podcasts (which may be helpful if you listen to multiple daily/weekly/monthly “news” podcasts of a similar topic).
• Supporting a newer project and open source community

The first two may not apply to you in particular, but I’m sure if you have other users that use the services you support then I’m sure they would appreciate having to learn/use a single app/interface for podcasts instead of having to learn one for searching/downloading (if they care about that at all), one for listening on mobile, one for listening on web, and another for managing their download/play sync.

Lots of good suggestions in this thread! A few additional ones that I don’t think I’ve seen yet:

• Testing/QA server (eg: test existing software’s major upgrades before upgrading your “production” environment, test new services without impacting your “production” environment, test new operating systems/virtualization software/etc.)
• Learn automation (eg: Terraform, Opentofu, Ansible, etc.) or horizontal scaling (eg: Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, etc.) to try improving future upgrades and/or high availability
• Media center PCs (eg: Kodi, LibreElec, OSMC, etc.) or gaming PCs for various TVs around your house to replace Apple TVs/Google TVs/etc. or gaming consoles
• Home Assistant

Thanks for the update! Really appreciate all of the work that has gone into this.

A few quick questions:

• Will the Android app be available on F-Droid? It looks like it should/will be, but I don’t see it on F-Droid at the moment.
• Is it possible to download episodes from a Pinepods server to a local device via a Pinepods client so the episodes can be stored on something externally, like a USB drive or old MP3 player? If so, can all/multiple episodes on the server for a podcast be downloaded without having to manually select each episode? The only download options that I have seen are for the server to download the episodes from the podcast’s source.