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Apple podcasts with macOS 10.15/Catalina

jaweiss
over 4 years ago

Background--Apple totally changed how Podcasts are handed in the most recent version of macOS. Not only do they have their own app, but they are now stored in a temporary and hidden cache file rather than in the main file system with music.  

For me, at least, this has totally messed up how podcasts are syncing with my 645M. They now show up on the watch with a random 4-digit hexadecimal name (which I'm guessing is the name of the temporary file each episode is saved as). The result is that podcasts are no longer sorted into subfolders for each show, and you can't see titles when browsing on the watch. The weird thing is that if you select a file, you can see the show/episode name. 

Is anyone else seeing this? Has anyone found a workaround?

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    I started seeing this happen with my Vivoactive 3 Music device as well. I also use a Mac to upload my podcasts and have been quite annoyed by this recent development.

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Also seeing this, but unfortunately haven't figured out a solution. Also haven't seen Garmin acknowledge the issue Disappointed

  • 0 over 4 years ago

    Same problem persists. IMac & Garmin 945

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Same problem on my 645m on macOS Monterrey 12.1 w/ latest firmware and garmin express 7.10.  At first I thought it may have to do with special characters like : or / or ' or length of name but that does not seem to be the case.   few examples

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to mcoliver

    update.  You can find the transfer logs in:

    ~/Library/Application Support/Garmin/Express/Logs

    The file transfers are in the Service.txt files

    In my case looks like it's pulling mp3s from the apple podcast cache at:

    ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/Cache

    The files in question didn't have Album or Title metadata set in the mp3's.  The Album is the showname for podcasts.

    I ran a test and updated the metadata on one of the files with ffmpeg to confirm that the missing metadata is the problem

    • FILE=6F40CD32-FCCF-4B40-B8ED-EC9055D8ABED.mp3
    • ffmpeg -i  $FILE -c copy -metadata album="mad money album" -metadata title="jan 4 2022 mad money" $FILE-new.mp3
    • rm -f $FILE
    • mv $FILE-new.mp3 $FILE

    The ran a re-sync with garmin express and now the track shows up properly :D 

    So it really comes down to:

    1. The people publishing the podcast's are not embedding the proper metadata in the mp3
    2. Apple is not requiring publishers to add the proper metadata nor updating the metadata if it is missing
    3. Garmin could check for missing metadata and add it prior to sync but does not do so

    The Garmin Express GUI app is able to pull the album and title name somehow (not sure how..maybe querying the Apple Podcast app database file directly?) so perhaps an ambitious engineer at Garmin could add a feature in the next version of Garmin Express to check for metadata in the mp3 prior to sync and update the mp3 file metadata for album and title so that it displays properly on the watch.

    This would be a HUGE user experience lift for thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people so hopefully the right person sees this and takes a stab at it.

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I wrote a program to fix the metadata.  If you run this before you launch Garmin Express it will update all the metadata in the cached mp3 files based on the info in the Apple Podcast Database. 

    Code here: https://github.com/mcoliver/fixPodcastMetadata

    macOS, Open a Terminal.app and paste this in prior to each launch of Garmin Express for a sync.  You may need to remove the podcasts if they already exist on your watch in order to get the new ones with the proper tags:

    pip3 install mutagen;
python3 -c "$(wget -q -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcoliver/fixPodcastMetadata/main/fixPodcastMetadata.py)"