

That is a little of how I use it too - I have all podcasts set to download automatically globally (set it up to 25 episodes at the same time) and put them in my queue so I always have exactly 25 episodes to listen to in any order there each day.
Then there are 2 daily podcasts that I do not let automatically download (but automatically refresh, and I love that the app delineates between the two), however one regularly produces longer episodes including a lot of the shorter ones that I do let it automatically download. Huh, I never realized how advanced the setup actually is. Though I do remember the actual ‘setting up’ being relatively painless after getting to grips with the global/per-podcast difference.
Also, fwiw I have the synchronization set up using one of the self-hosted options instead of the default gpodder service - which is often down intermittently - and it works well enough, even if a bit slow every now and again.
As @const_void@lemmy.ml points out, there’s a bunch of players that can scrobble directly to listenbrainz.
But even if you use some player that does not have support for it, you can make any player that can scrobble to last.fm work with listenbrainz instead since they provide a compatible API. This includes even software which officially only supports last.fm by simply changing the scrobble destination it wants to scrobble to in your hosts file.
It really is pretty nice software.