Laughable, a top-rated comedy podcast app, comes to Android

• A comedy podcast app, Laughable, available on iOS for two years, has just launched on Android. The app uses profiles, so you can follow comedians’ own podcasts and where they’ve been a guest. Once you subscribe to your favorite people and shows, Laughable keeps you current on future episodes, too – including people’s guest appearances. The developer tells us that no other podcast app is more highly rated in Apple’s App Store (scoring 4.9/5 after 3,600 reviews).

  
  Aug 11 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Spotify has published new podcast terms and conditions. It’ll take 40 minutes to read. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports on Spotify’s recent purchase of podcast production company Parcast: “one person close to the negotiation said that Spotify is paying more than $100m in cash and earn-outs to buy Parcast. The price equates to an enormous multiple on Parcast’s limited revenues, this person added.”

• Google Podcasts is now transcribing some podcasts, says Android Authority, who’ve worked out how to see the transcripts in some Google Podcasts pages (details below in our “developer’s corner”).

• The finalists of the Australian Podcast Awards have been announced. The winners are to be announced at the awards ceremony on 18th May at the Seymour Centre, Sydney NSW, Australia.

• Tales of behind the scenes at the recording for Marvel’s Wolverine: The Lost Trail - recorded “in ambisonic”, it meant the recording was almost like making a movie, according to a piece in Inverse.

• Event: Podsummit, in Calgary AB, Canada, on June 22nd.

  
  Aug 11 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Podcasts

A podcast from a zoo keeper? Taronga Tales contains stories from Taronga Zoo, in Sydney and Dubbo NSW, Australia. (Whooshkaa)

Happy Birthday, Start Here. The show with Brad Mielke started on March 28th last year. (ABC News / Wide Orbit)

Launching on March 31, Minor Adventures with Topher Grace promises “exciting adventures with your favorite celebrities, Informative and eye-opening explorations of niche topics, hands-on demonstrations and entertaining experiments.” In the upcoming season, Nina Dobrev learns to DJ, Tig Notaro becomes an auctioneer, and Chelsea Peretti takes Myers-Briggs. (Our Editor reckons he’s INFP. You?) (Simplecast)

The Bellas Podcast is new from WWE Superstars, TV personalities and entrepreneurs, celebrity twins Nikki and Brie Bella. (Endeavor Audio / Megaphone)

YouTuber Savannah Brown is the guest on the new episode of 17 Questions today.

Developer’s corner

• Google Podcasts is erroneously returning a “200 OK” header for all podcasts, even ones that no longer exist or ones that have never existed. If you were previously inspecting the header for a 404, we’d recommend looking for the text Error 404 (Not Found) in the body. (Or, you know, Google could provide an API.) We’ve reported this behaviour.
• Listen Notes has launched v2 of their API on different infrastructure, as well as new, simpler, pricing.
• Here’s how to find the transcript within a Google Podcasts episode page, like this one - under “inspect > network” it’s in a file request made by the page called /_/PodcastsUi/data/batchexecute and is a protected file. View the response in Chrome devtools, and you’ll see a long, JSON-looking string, including the entire transcript. They’re not transcribing our podcast, TWiT, or The Daily as far as we can see though. (Reminder - episode links are at the bottom of every podcast page here on Podnews).