Closing the Loop: How I Made My Coros Pace 4 Watch Talk to My Podcast App

I hate boring, manual work. I hate duplication even more than boring work. Luckily, I have the skills to eliminate both.I listen to podcasts on long runs, never during workouts. It is the one chance I have to chip away at the podcast backlog, because the weekly commute is not enough. But carrying a phone for that created its own problem. Recently I got a new watch. The Coros Pace 4 is a fantastic running watch that plays audio files. It doesn’t integrate with any streaming service but takes raw MP3 files instead, early 2000s MP3-player style. Download a few podcast episodes manually, copy them onto the watch, and go for the long run. Three issues: the raw episode files are not human-readable, which makes it challenging to choose an episode on the watch interface—think 422225950-44100-2-bf5e92b380232.mp3. Second, after the run I would have to open the podcast app on my phone and mark the episode as played. Lastly, I’d have to delete the episode on the watch itself (remembering the…