How to put podcasts on Shokz OpenSwim headphones
They're an MP3 player with no radio inside. Nothing arrives wirelessly and nothing streams — you load files over USB, and they play whatever they find. Here's the whole method by hand, the four things that go wrong, and — last — the app that does it all for you.
The method, start to finish
Get the episode as a file
Most podcasts publish a plain MP3, and most episode pages have a download link. If yours doesn't, the show's RSS feed lists one file per episode — open the feed and the episode's enclosure tag holds the file's address. A podcast that offers no file at all is usually one of the locked ones; more on those below.
Plug the headphones in
Use the charging cradle or the magnetic cable. Windows and macOS both mount them as an ordinary removable drive — no driver, no software, nothing to install. If nothing shows up, it's usually the contacts: dry them off and seat the magnet squarely.
Check it's a format they play
MP3, AAC and M4A, FLAC and WAV all play as they are. Opus, Vorbis, WMA and anything still in a video container don't — and Opus is what a growing number of feeds now serve. Converting is one command; it's in the table below.
Copy across, then eject properly
Drag the files onto the drive like any USB stick. Eject it properly rather than pulling the cable — the volume is FAT32, and interrupting a write is how the file table gets damaged. Then go swim.
The four things that go wrong
None of these are obvious, and three of them look exactly like a broken pair of headphones. They're not — here's what's actually going on.
| A track will not play | It's almost always the format. The player skips what it can't decode, usually in
silence. Convert it with ffmpeg and copy the result across instead:
ffmpeg -i episode.opus -c:a libmp3lame -b:a 192k episode.mp3 |
|---|---|
| A long episode plays out of order | The device plays files in the order the filesystem hands them over — not by track
number, not by tag. Split a two-hour episode into Part 1 through
Part 12 and you'll get part 10 straight after part 1. Pad the
numbers — Part 01, Part 02 — and they sort themselves
out. |
| Deleting files does not free space | Windows Explorer doesn't really delete from a removable drive — the files just
move to a hidden $RECYCLE.BIN on the device and keep taking up room.
Empty the recycle bin, or delete with Shift+Delete. Some players will also try to
play the stray files Windows and macOS scatter about (Thumbs.db,
.DS_Store, ._ files), which is where mystery silent
tracks come from. |
| A large file refuses to copy | FAT32 can't hold a single file over 4 GB, no matter what the free space says. It also gets grumpy when it's completely full, so leave a little headroom rather than packing it to the last megabyte. |
What no tool can do
Spotify, Audible and Apple Podcasts subscriber shows are locked inside their own apps. There's no file to copy, so nothing can put them on a plain USB drive — not this app, and not anything else, whatever it claims. If the show you want is exclusive to one of those, the honest answer is that these headphones can't play it.
When doing it by hand stops being worth it
The method above works, it's permanent, and it costs nothing. It's also about ten minutes a week of downloading, converting, renaming and pruning — and every step is the same step as last week. That's the point where a tool earns its place.
What Podlaps does instead
It follows your feeds, fetches whatever's new, converts anything the device can't play, names split parts so they sort correctly — audiobook chapters included — and deletes the episode it replaces, so you never run out of room.
The part nobody does by hand
It reads every file back off the headphones and checks it against the original, so a copy that silently failed shows up at your desk — not at the deep end. That's a check nobody runs manually, and it's the one that matters most.
It never deletes anything it didn't add. Podlaps keeps a list of every file it copied, and the music you put there yourself stays exactly where it is.
One show free, forever — not a trial. Works with OpenSwim, OpenSwim Pro and SWIM PRO.