New year, big update. Castamatic 12.5 is all about more freedom, more reach, and more peace of mind. Whether you love supporting your favorite podcasters with sats or just want to make sure your podcast library is safe, this update has something for you.
Let’s dive into the three headline features.
Until now, sending boosts and streaming sats in Castamatic meant using Alby as the wallet. That worked well, but it felt limiting to be tied to a single provider. The goal has always been to make Castamatic as open and connectable as possible, and giving listeners the freedom to choose their own wallet is a natural step in that direction.
Castamatic 12.5 introduces support for Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC), an open protocol that lets you hook up virtually any NWC-compatible Lightning wallet to the app. Whether you prefer Primal, Rizful or any other wallet that supports NWC, you’re good to go. Of course Alby is still my favorite option, and Castamatic can connect to it both via the old method and connecting directly to AlbyHub via NWC.
Setting it up is simple: head to the Value 4 Value settings, tap Connect NWC Wallet, and either scan a QR code from your wallet app or paste the connection URI. That’s it. Once connected, everything works just like before – boosts, streaming sats, the whole deal – except now the funds come straight from your new wallet.
Here’s a problem worth solving: many new wallet services are emerging, they are good and user friendly, but don’t support keysend payments. If we want to encourage the adoption of V4V by as many podcasters and listeners as possible, we need to find a way to support these new wallets. LNURL-pay is a more common method of transmitting sats on the Lightning Network, and it makes it more user friendly too with the introduction of Lightning Address (the address to send sats to a wallet is no more a combination of random characters, but something easy like an email, mine is franco@getalby.com). The problem with LNURL-pay is that it doesn’t allow sending enough custom content to contain the metadata needed for Value4Value (sender, timestamp, message…), so there needs to be some sort of side channel for that. That’s exactly what BoostBox API gives. When a boost or streaming payment goes out, Castamatic now attaches rich metadata – things like the podcast name, episode title, listening position, and any message included. This metadata travels along with the payment so that when a creator receives support, they know exactly what episode inspired it and what the listener had to say.
The result: more podcasters can receive boosts, even if they only have a simple Lightning Address and no node of their own. And every payment is more meaningful because it carries context, not just sats.
New phone, fresh install, and suddenly it’s a struggle to remember which 47 podcasts were in the queue and where that three-hour episode left off. Those days are over.
Castamatic 12.5 introduces full backup and restore – both manual and automatic.
Automatic backups happen silently in the background once a week. Subscriptions, settings, playback progress, and playlists are all saved to iCloud Drive without lifting a finger. The last four backups are always kept around, so there’s always a recent snapshot available.
For a more hands-on approach, a manual backup can be exported anytime from the new Backup section in Settings (under Service). The backup file can go anywhere – iCloud Drive, email, AirDrop – whatever works. And restoring is just as easy: open the backup file or tap Restore in Settings, and everything comes back exactly as it was.
A podcast library is personal. Now it’s protected too.
Castamatic 12.5 is available now on the App Store. As always, feedback and reviews are very welcome.
Happy listening!