How to listen to a podcast in 2023:
- Find its page on Apple podcasts
- Repeatedly click 'show more episodes' until all are shown
- Select all, view selection source, save as html
- Extract the episode page urls with grep and sed
- yt-dlp to download the mp3s
- figure out how to identify beginning and end of ad breaks
- write some python code to load up the audio and strip the ads
- shell script to call the python and then re-encode as mp3
- copy to local web server
- listen and enjoy
Even if the podcast doesn't turn out to be any good, it already kept me entertained for a couple of hours. If there existed a convenient, safe, and anonymous way to pay $5 for the ad-free version, and if I had $5, then I'd have saved some time and the creators would've made more money out of it.