Last Updated on February 21, 2023
A podcast is rich media, such as audio or video, distributed via RSS. Podcast derives from the words broadcast and iPod. Podcasting lets you automatically receive the latest show of your chosen programme as soon as it is available.
Podcasts are shows, similar to radio or TV shows, that are produced by professionals or amateurs and made available on the internet to stream and/or download. They have entered into a more mature phase; a few of the podcasts featured in this article are coming up to their tenth anniversary.
There is a wide range of podcast tools available for Linux, but we are always looking for new tools. We’ve received comments from readers recommending we take a look at Kasts, an app we had neglected. With a plethora of interesting open source software available, sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees.
Kasts is billed as a “convergent podcast application”. The program is written in C++ and QML and uses the Kirigami UI Framework. It’s free and open source software.
Installation
You probably won’t find a convenient package for your distro. We did test the package available in the Arch User Repository (for Arch-based distros), but compiling the software for yourself is straightforward.
Clone the project’s repository with the command:
$ git clone https://invent.kde.org/plasma-mobile/kasts
Change into the newly created directory.
$ cd kasts
Compile the code:
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr
$ make
And install the software with the command:
$ sudo make install
FYI: You can create an alias for make to speed up compilation. For example on a machine with 6 cores, add the following line to .bashrc (or equivalent file depending on the shell you are running).
alias make='make -j6'
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
What does convergent really mean? More techno babble?
Convergence means that a piece of software’s user interface can immediately adapt its user experience to the particularities of each type of device that it can run on (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, etc).
Then again who would want to run KDE shizzle on a phone?
Plasma Mobile is actually good
Normally, apps are written for a Plasma desktop, or a Gnome desktop.
Convergent apps are more fluid – jack of all environments, but master of none (no point trying to use keyboard shortcuts to access a file menu or whatever – it’s usually a point and click/touch friendly interface).
Kasts offers me the option to stream – I don’t download podcasts now unless I want them archived.