A mind-blown moment with Audiobookshelf and RSS

I recently purchased a Humble Bundle of audiobooks and I was setting up the Audiobookshelf app on my phone to download and listen. While doing this I had a glorious revelation that I could add to my podcatcher of choice (AntennaPod) using RSS and it is one of the best things I’ve found this year.

For a couple years I have been using a combination of Podgrab and Audiobookshelf to automatically download podcasts and then organize and serve them over my LAN. You can see my setup here. I do this to archive podcasts I enjoy and some that I know I will get to eventually and I don’t want access to disappear (say, behind a paywall on Spotify for example).

In this setup I figured out how to publish a feed and subscribe to it through AntennaPod so I could have a centralized podcast downloader and then serve the feeds to my phone, tablet, PC, whatever. Kinda cool, don’t use it much. But, while finally importing some audiobooks into… Audiobookshelf, I realized I could serve the audiobook via RSS from Audiobookshelf to the same podcast app.

Mind. Blown.

Now, instead of having multiple apps, I can just have both audiobooks and podcasts come into the same app. This means I can simplify my phone setup AND use my podcast listening settings.

I have Audiobookshelf setup with Docker, pointed at a directory of audiobooks on my NAS, and configured through my reverse proxy.

I was so freaking stoked when I figured it out. A good day.