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.

🎧 Smart Speed and Voice Boost - 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