RSS podcasts controls ( listening order , bulk mark played, add last # to queue)

[Retrospecs]

I want to set the playing order for the rss feed: Play older first or play newer first.

I understand storybased podcast you might want to listen in chronological order. News or current events, you usually want to listen newest first.

I want to set up a news podcast to play automatically play when I wake up (using home assistant).
I'm starting a MA.playmedia from HA automation using the media ID being the name of the podcast.
The current behaviour seem to be finding the oldest unplayed episode and adding everything newer (even if already played, this might be a bug dunno).

I found a very labor intensive work-around, I can go and manually mark each episode by clicking the kebab menu on each. (500+ per feed)
I suggest the "marked played" action should be added to the multiselect checkboxes. The opposite "marked unplayed" should also be available with multiselect.

It'd be great if I could have the option to choose how many episodes to add the last, w/ filter for played/unplayed in the HA playmedia action.

[PePeLLee]

How did you manage to have latest episodes? I do get new episodes only when I go to configuration and hit refresh.

[DAONEW]

I have possibly found the dumbest solution to play the latest episodes with standard rss.
The script skips through all episodes to finally reach the newest.

With ABS the order is correct it seems, with rss its reversed as old episodes are first in the list.

alias: Play Ab 17 Podcast
sequence:
  - data:
      config_entry_id: XXX
      media_type: podcast
      favorite: true
      search: ab 17
    response_variable: latest_podcast
    action: music_assistant.get_library
  - data:
      media_id: "{{ latest_podcast['items'][0]['uri'] }}"
      entity_id: media_player.lounge
    action: music_assistant.play_media
  - action: music_assistant.get_queue
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.lounge
    response_variable: queue
    data: {}
  - variables:
      queue_items: "{{ queue['media_player.lounge']['items'] }}"
  - repeat:
      count: "{{ queue_items }}"
      sequence:
        - target:
            entity_id: media_player.lounge
          action: media_player.media_next_track
          data: {}

[jandechent]

The option to mark many as played is most missed my me.

[OzGav]

This will be added to the actions menu in the next update to the front end

[SpencerDub]

Adding my vote to this request. My most direct use case is exactly what you described, @Retrospecs: playing the most recent episode of a news briefing podcast.

[mrsimoon]

I think this is what a lot of us would like, it's the daily podcasts that don't play well with music assistant right now, just because there's no programmmatic way of always playing the latest one at present. The scheduled refresh means it's one step closer, even though that aspect could previously be triggered by a script in any case

[Yowaishi]

I also would appreciate the ability to bulk mark as played - a podcast I listen to has been going for over 20 years and I don't want to mark over a thousand episodes as played one by one

[OzGav]

This will be added to the actions menu in the next update to the front end

[anli77]

Adding my vote to this also, I think the RSS feed plugin should have a setting that lets you set the sort order of the RSS feed since it only takes one feed per instance anyway, so you can set news or similar podcast feeds as "latest first", and others would have the current behaviour, something like this: music-assistant/server@dev...anli77:music-assistant-server:dev

Note: I have not tested that this works, was just as example.

[mrsimoon]

Now that scheduled refresh is in place, the feature to play the most recent podcast in a list is the only thing missing from music assistant to make it the go-to for all podcast needs in HA