Apple Podcasts Subscriptions

In macOS Catalina the podcast fetcher was moved from iTunes to a dedicated Podcasts app which is now missing some of the functionality that was available in the previous version.

For example, the OPML import and export functionality is missing so I went looking for an SQLite database that Apple likes to use for this kind of storage (similar to highlight information for Books).

I found a plist file which lists all the podcast subscriptions under:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.podcasts/Data/Documents/PodcastsDB.plist

with the relevant parts looking like this:

<array>
    <dict>
        <key>feedUrl</key>
        <string>https://jasonbarnard.com/feed/podcast/</string>
        <key>title</key>
        <string>#SEOisAEO Digital Marketing Podcast - The most fun you'll ever have learning about digital from the experts</string>
        <key>uuid</key>
        <string>131C83A7-7244-4B9C-96CE-2847C84C9A06</string>
    </dict>
    <dict>
        <key>feedUrl</key>
        <string>http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:130477445/sounds.rss</string>
        <key>storeId</key>
        <string>956912399</string>
        <key>title</key>
        <string>1 Day Business Breakthrough - Helping Entrepreneurs Discover Their Next Big Idea Today |1DayBB</string>
        <key>uuid</key>
        <string>B3D9254A-EF70-4B3E-8F10-6A811D54104D</string>
    </dict>
</array>

I’m still now sure how the UUID is calculated.

Export as OPML

I created a PHP package to create an OPML export of all your subscriptions. Here is how to use it if you have PHP and Composer installed locally:

composer create-project kasparsd/podcasts-tools
cd podcasts-tools
composer export > opml.xml

which will install the package and export the feeds to opml.xml in the same directory.