A Quick Dip Into Podcast Addict's Data
Earlier this year I switched to the Android app Podcast Addict, which has been working well enough for my purposes. This morning I decided to find a new podcast to listen to, and, after a few different searches, found one that looked interesting. I started listening to the latest episode to get a feel for it, and ended up listening to the whole thing.
I went looking in my playback history so I could subscribe to the podcast, but the episode wasn’t there! And of course I couldn’t remember the name of the podcast well enough to find it using the search bar either. Some brief googling turned up a reddit post discussing this very issue. Podcast Addict apparently doesn’t keep track of anything unless you’re subscribed to the podcast already. Not that it makes available to you in the app, anyways. Luckily, my search also turned up a post on extracting podcast addict listening history. Turns out that PA’s backup file is a SQLite database! That’s great, because Datasette makes exploring SQLite databases extremely easy.
After following the instructions in the linked post to get my data, I loaded it into datasette (datasette podcastAddict.db
) and started digging around. My PA backup has roughly 17k rows across 34 tables, but luckily I don’t need to look at most of that in order to find what I want.
A quick look at the episode table shows that I can facet it by the boolean seen_status
column, cutting out ~90% of the rows, then order by playback_date
to put my most recently played episode at the top.
The podcast ID is right there and I can go look that up in the podcast table (or edit the SQL manually and do a JOIN
, if that’s the mood I’m in). Success!