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You’re Doing That Wrong is a journal of various successes and failures by Dan Sturm.

"Overcast to Castro" Shortcut

I love podcasts. And I love when my friends on the internet share the podcasts they love.

One of the most common ways people share their podcast recommendations is with a link from their podcast player app, which, more often than not, is Overcast. I, however, am primarily a Castro user.

I can't count how many times I've opened an Overcast link on social media, switched over to Castro, searched for that podcast by name in the Castro "Discover" tab, then added the recommended episode to my Queue for listening later. An incredibly inefficient and annoying workflow.

Oh, how I wish I could just press a button and have that Overcast link open in Castro, showing me the episode ready to be queued.

Both Overcast and Castro support public URLs for sharing shows and individual episodes. This is in addition to the apps' specific iOS URL schemes.

I have no idea how either of these apps are generating their episode-specific URLs, but the URLs for the main feed of a podcast use the podcast's iTunes ID. The Overcast and Castro links for the Defocused main feed are https://overcast.fm/itunes891398524 and https://castro.fm/itunes/891398524, respectively.

Which means I can create a quick Shortcut to swap an Overcast link for a Castro link.

 
 

Half of a Solution

Since this shortcut only works on a podcast's main feed URL, not an episode specific URL, I still have to do some work to get the podcast episode into my Castro Queue. I have to open the Overcast link, tap on the name of the podcast at the top of the player to go to its main feed, run the shortcut, tap the "Open in Castro" button, tap the button that allows Safari to actually open Castro, then find and add the specific episode to my Queue.

Look how pretty these screenshots are. They were made with Stu Maschwitz’s “Big Tennis Screenshots” Shortcut, which you can download here.

Not ideal, but much more pleasant than manually searching for the name of the show. Especially if episode being shared by the Overcast user happens to be the most recent episode of the show since Castro loads with the Action buttons for that episode ready to tap.

Maybe one of these days I or, more likely, one of you much smarter people, will figure out how to translate episode specific URLs that open directly within Castro (or Overcast), avoiding all these Safari links as a bridge. Heck, while I'm wishing for unlikely things, maybe Castro will finally get timestamped URLs, too. One can dream, right?