Google Podcasts

Hey everyone.

I'm writing this as an individual wonk listener, not as a mod.

Google Podcasts will be shut down in a week (April 2, 2024). One thing that's been really frustrating about the process is that there's no way to export your listening history. For a long running podcast like Knowledge Fight, that's devastating.

I wrote this script that I used to download my own listening history. Doing something useful with this history (e.g. uploading it) is another problem, but at least I have something I can refer to later.

I'm sharing what I've written in the hopes it can be useful to other people left in the lurch by this shutdown.

Don't run random un-trusted code on your computer. I'm trying to make this as simple to read and open-source as possible so others can inspect what I'm doing. Anyone is free to reuse the following code under the MIT Licence.

// Get all the elements corresponding to the episodes.
var episodes = Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('oD3fme'));

// For each episode, grab the title, and the little button to play the episode.
// Extract the text (e.g. "Completed", "3 minutes left", "1 hour 40 min")
const episodes_data = episodes.map((episode) => ({
  'name': episode.getElementsByClassName('e3ZUqe')[0].textContent,
  'playchip': episode.getElementsByClassName('J0Qtec')[0].textContent
}));

// This creates a link element that, when "clicked" will download the data above as a file.
// Then, it "clicks" that element, triggering the download.
// Then, it cleans up the link.
const json_content = JSON.stringify(episodes_data, null, 2);
const blob = new Blob([json_content], { type: 'application/json' });
const url = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
const a = document.createElement('a');
a.href = url;
a.download = 'kf_episodes_listen_history.json';
document.body.appendChild(a);
a.click();
document.body.removeChild(a);
URL.revokeObjectURL(url);

Here are instructions for how to use this:

1. I'm using Chrome v123. Other browsers and versions should work fine, but YMMV.

2. Visit the Google Podcasts Web page for Knowledge Fight, while logged into the right Google account. Confirm you can see the listening history in the play chips -- this is what the script will scrape.

3. Run the script. NEVER RUN CODE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. You have two options:

   1. Open the developer console and paste in the code.

   2. Make the code into a bookmarklet, and click that bookmarklet while viewing the page.

4. You should see a file kf_episodes_listen_history.json be downloaded. This file contains a human readable listing of the episode titles and what text was next to the play button, which is enough to know which episodes are complete, which are in progress, and which are untouched.

I hope this can be helpful to others. One final caveat -- the page is obfuscated, and it's possible that the script could break if the obfuscation changes. I don't think that's likely, and I've never seen the class names change in practice, but if it downloads an empty file, that's probably why.

I want to track my podcast listening history.

I currently use Google Podcasts, but it doesn't provide an easy way to export my subscriptions (OPML) or my listening history. I have built a proof of concept to export an OPML file of my subscriptions as well as a list of podcasts I started/finished listening to (with progress %), but I can't find any date or timestamp that says when I listened to a specific podcast.

I'm currently looking to migrate to a more fully-featured app/platform that works on Android (and preferably cross-platform). Do you have any recommendations? As I said earlier, I'm especially interested in precisely tracking my listening history (manual file export or API).