Spotify is not the home of all podcasts, and it’s actually a really shitty way to get your podcasts imo. Other people pointed me toward AntennaPod (which is free and open source) and it’s just straight up better. There are several advantages, but the only one I needed to hear about was not needing to connect to a server to be able to listen to a podcast I had already downloaded to my phone. If I didn’t listen to a podcast for a couple seconds from my home wifi before getting in the car, I’d just be driving for a few minutes in silence until Spotify could verify that I was a paying customer before they’d let me listen to free content already downloaded to my device. Ridiculous.
Not shitting on you, btw. Just shitting on Spotify and hopefully introducing some people to a thing that’s made my life better.
I wish they’d make a podcast app with a playback feature that’s not just a single seekbar. If for some reason you need to scroll through something, having a small bar represent an hour or two doesn’t give much granularity. I’ve been using audiopo, where your entire screen becomes the playback bar, but it’s not really a podcast app so it doesn’t have a good way to organize your files.
We don’t really have a good UI solution to that anywhere, though.
The closest I’ve seen is with longform video apps, where scrubbing along the progress bar pops up a little video preview, but it’s not consistently available, it’s a half-baked idea, and if I had a dollar for every time the preview didn’t match up to what you actually got when you hit play, I’d probably have enough to hire someone to fix it.
In podcasts, I think chapters is the best idea going, but it’s not well-implemented either.
I think scrubbing along the progress bar is just a bad visual metaphor. I don’t know what’s better, but I just don’t think it’s great.
Antenna Pod is great! Lately I’ve been using Podcast Republic and I can’t remember why I tried it specifically, but importantly it has very in-depth retention and download rules so I can exclude previews of the paid feed that are only 20 minutes long, sort podcasts by date or by title (handy if you pull in LibriVox books by RSS feed), create a podcast from a folder of files, and various other handy features.
Spotify is not the home of all podcasts, and it’s actually a really shitty way to get your podcasts imo. Other people pointed me toward AntennaPod (which is free and open source) and it’s just straight up better. There are several advantages, but the only one I needed to hear about was not needing to connect to a server to be able to listen to a podcast I had already downloaded to my phone. If I didn’t listen to a podcast for a couple seconds from my home wifi before getting in the car, I’d just be driving for a few minutes in silence until Spotify could verify that I was a paying customer before they’d let me listen to free content already downloaded to my device. Ridiculous.
Not shitting on you, btw. Just shitting on Spotify and hopefully introducing some people to a thing that’s made my life better.
Pocket Casts is my favorite, but AP is a great option that I used for quite a while.
I second Pocket Casts, but I was grandfathered in, so I’m not getting the new user experience, though I only take advantage of the desktop app.
Mm, fair point. I was also grandfathered in. But if I recall correctly, the free stuff is still pretty great.
I wish they’d make a podcast app with a playback feature that’s not just a single seekbar. If for some reason you need to scroll through something, having a small bar represent an hour or two doesn’t give much granularity. I’ve been using audiopo, where your entire screen becomes the playback bar, but it’s not really a podcast app so it doesn’t have a good way to organize your files.
We don’t really have a good UI solution to that anywhere, though.
The closest I’ve seen is with longform video apps, where scrubbing along the progress bar pops up a little video preview, but it’s not consistently available, it’s a half-baked idea, and if I had a dollar for every time the preview didn’t match up to what you actually got when you hit play, I’d probably have enough to hire someone to fix it.
In podcasts, I think chapters is the best idea going, but it’s not well-implemented either.
I think scrubbing along the progress bar is just a bad visual metaphor. I don’t know what’s better, but I just don’t think it’s great.
Oh wow. I’ve never heard of Pocket Casts.
Of their top 100 podcasts - Meidas Touch is not even listen. Thank you for this.
I’m not entirely sure that counts. Last I heard, their “top x” lists were just aggregates of other storefronts’ “top x” lists.
Antenna Pod is great! Lately I’ve been using Podcast Republic and I can’t remember why I tried it specifically, but importantly it has very in-depth retention and download rules so I can exclude previews of the paid feed that are only 20 minutes long, sort podcasts by date or by title (handy if you pull in LibriVox books by RSS feed), create a podcast from a folder of files, and various other handy features.