Launching today
Parasocial
The podcast player for sharing.
511 followers
The podcast player for sharing.
511 followers
PARASOCIAL is a fast, native podcast player for people who really love podcasts. Get new episodes the moment they publish, automatically download and organize them with smart playlist rules, search huge libraries instantly, bookmark and tag favorites, and share your parasocial relationship with friends. Native on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and CarPlay, with seamless sync and no account required.
Parasocial
Hello Product Hunt community 👋
I'm Paul, the founder of Parasocial.
I'm a podcast addict. I listen at night in bed, so I need a sleep timer that works. I dig through decades-old archives, so I need audio processing that rescues unmastered tape. I want comedy to stay with comedy and history to stay with history without ever sorting anything by hand. I want my episodes on my phone the second they are published, not after six hours of refreshing. I've paid for every other player, and none of them kept up with my needs.
So I built Parasocial, because podcasts should be a joy to listen to. We fixed everything you hate about podcast players. We built a player that checks every box, and we won't stop there.
Three things no other player does:
⚡️ Speedy Network Notifications. Your favorite show drops at the same time every day, and your player still finds out hours later. Ours doesn't wait. Our server is told the moment a show publishes, so the episode is on your device, downloaded for offline listening. No more endless refreshing, no six-hour polling wall.
🔖 Bookmarks and tags, not stars. Fifteen years of listening and I never once found the "favorites" or "stars" useful, so we killed them. Save the episodes you love with tags, then grab them and share them in seconds. Organize the shows you love.
🏆 Parasocial: Share your parasocial relationship with friends, earn superlatives, and share clips or whole shows with deep links for Parasocial users and live weblinks for Paranons.
Plus everything else you'd expect from a top-tier player:
🚀 Fast - your library reads from a database on the device, not the network, so tens of thousands of episodes stay instant
🔎 Better Search - one field searches your own library first and tens of thousands of published shows across every network
✅ Organized - smart playlists built from rules, per-show priorities, and manual overrides that don't break the rule that built the list.
🎧 Trim Gaps and Studio Sound - trim the gaps in the talking 20 times a second and put warmth back under the voice; two hours of talk hands back fifteen minutes without any audio degradation.
🚗 Everywhere - CarPlay built in, a web player for sharing with the Paranons, native on iPhone, iPad and Mac!
💥 Yours - everything syncs across every device with no email, no password, no profile. No ads. Never will be. And when I say never, I mean never.
👀 How it works:
Install Parasocial and import your OPML or Advanced OPLM for playlists, priorities, played state, and progress. We're pretty proud of the import. It's the most advanced around. Move from any podcast player that lets you export.
Search the directory or paste an RSS feed. Quickly find what you're looking for, whether it's in your library or out there in the ether.
Build a smart playlist (or a dumb one).
Bookmark, tag and share with friends.
Check back after your first week of listening for a "wrapped" style superlative.
What we have in-store:
⌚️ Apple Watch app that works when you leave your phone at home
🗣 On-device transcripts for shows that don't publish their own
🎧 A personal audio locker for the files that aren't podcasts
🪩 More Disco (yes please): the colorway that lights every control in the Super Simple spectrum
📺 Category browsing and recommendations that learn from your habits
And so much more!
Parasocial is free to download on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Two weeks free, then $2.99/month or $14.99/year. No account necessary, no invasive tracking, and in my opinion, the best podcast player ever made.
😻 Please do share any feedback and comments, and of course feel free to share Parasocial with anyone who has given up on their podcast app! We're still building every single day, like it's a full-time job.
Happy listening,
Paul
@paulgeller Always happy to support an indie dev who built something out of their own personal frustration... nice congrats🙌
Parasocial
@priya_kushwaha1 Thank you. Really appreciate it!
Blockem
I'm curious about smart playlists. How flexible are the rules if your podcast library is quite messy?
Parasocial
@angelaaa Smart playlists are really quite simple. Instead of building them by hand, you can add one or more shows so that all of their episodes are included. You can pin priority shows so that they stay on top. You can have it automatically organized by newest or oldest episode. Most of the things you'd come to expect in a smart playlist.
I'm open to other ideas too if you think there are things that'll help you organize your library a bit better.
Softorino 💻📲
The clips I want to share are always the 40 seconds in the middle of a 90 minute episode. Does sharing give me that as an audio file or a link?
Parasocial
@yelyzaveta_kibets They are deep links, so when you share at a particular point in an episode, you are sharing with other parasocial users right at that segment. For non-parasocial users, or as I call them, ahem, Paranons, they get a link to a web player.
Note that this has been a tiny bit finicky in the current release, but I have one queued for tomorrow that smooths it out.
Softorino 💻📲
@paulgeller The Paranon web player is the part I'd have worried about, that's the half that decides if the link gets opened. Good luck with tomorrow's build.
Parasocial
@yelyzaveta_kibets I think you'll be impressed then!
I love podcasts. I used to work at a podcast app (Podyssey.fm, RIP). After it shut down I ended up on Spotify by default, and honestly Spotify's podcast experience is so bad it made me stop listening to podcasts.
New episodes just wouldn't show up in my feed. I'd find out a week later that a show I follow had dropped three episodes. Eventually I gave up, which is kind of embarrassing for someone who used to do this for a living.
Parasocial's whole pitch is "episodes show up the second they publish," which only makes logical sense!
That's literally the thing I quit podcasts over - ha!
Downloaded this. Everything sense to me in a way current podcast apps don't. Smart playlists, tags instead of stars, no account, works on my Mac.
Feels like it was built by someone who actually listens to podcasts!
Excited to get back into listening. Congrats on the launch, @paulgeller !!
Parasocial
@thisisaliceko Thanks for the kind words, Alice. Wait till you see what we have coming up next.
The bookmarking and tagging system is a really nice addition. I can see now that it will be quite useful for saving specific moments from long episodes.
Parasocial
@1mirul absolutely. It's one of my favorite conveniences. Even though tags are private right now, I've thought about how they could be used to currate playlists automatically.
Lancepilot
Parasocial
@odeth_negapatan1 Thanks! It truly is. I built this app because I'm a paying user of almost every single app in the ecosystem, and I was still unimpressed with the pace of development around podcast listening in general. There are so many good ones out there, but none that do it all. I hope this one does, and I'll keep building. Thanks again.
The "get new episodes the moment they publish" line is the part I'd want to understand — are you polling feeds aggressively, or listening on podping/WebSub? I spend most of my time on the publishing side, and the lag between a feed updating and apps actually showing the episode is the thing creators complain about most, so if you've genuinely closed that I'd love to know how. Also curious how sync works with no account required — iCloud, or something else?
Parasocial
@podcastbud New episodes show up fast because we watch podping (Hive blockchain events that hosts like Buzzsprout, Transistor, RSS.com, Captivate, Podigee, and Audioboom fire the instant they publish); typically a few seconds from publish to detection. For hosts that don't podping, we're adding a WebSub subscriber next to close that small gap; until then, those feeds fall back to polling, which, yes, is extremely aggressive. But that was the killer feature for me. I want my episodes NOW.
Re: Sync is anonymous: no account, just an iCloud-backed identity that follows you across your own devices.