Podcast Republic is my choice as well. It’s the only Podcast app that I could find that let’s you choose your download folder. I like to play my podcasts with the same app I listen to books with, so I need to download the podcasts to a publicly accessible folder.
I like that I can create my own playlists with multiple sort options. It also has more speed options, as well as its own “shorten pauses” thing where it clips down awkward pauses and stuff.
Also a big fan of AntennaPod, I switched to it back when Google first announced they were axing Podcasts and thought I'd have a lot less time to abandon ship than I ended up with.
Thanks for the recommendation. I was wondering what else to try as I sure as hell don't want to use YouTube and it doesn't seem like you can have a separate podcast playlist in Spotify.
I have a lifetime membership with PocketCasts, but I don’t know if I’d chose it today with the subscription. A few months ago, they shipped a buggy version and I temporarily switched to AntennaPod and was considering staying.
I love Pocket Casts. Sadly I have a hard time recommending it to new people since they switched to subscription model payment. The reason I love it is because of what it was, not what it is. I’m grandfathered into the "pay once, own forever"and if I wasn’t I would probably be using something else these days. I’m still gonna throw it in as a recommendation though, because it’s damn good and people should make up their own minds in whether it is worth the payment.
I use the free tier and it is very good. Does everything I need. I won’t pay for a subscription for a podcast app, so it’s shame I can’t buy it to show my appreciation.
I pay $10/year for my podcast app (Overcast). Considering it does everything I want it to do that a lot of other apps don’t (or didn’t, years ago when I started with Overcast), and I use it 8+ hours a day it seems reasonable.
I don’t mind their subscription model. All the subscription features – cloud storage, folders, desktop app, extra themes – really feel like bonus features that aren’t essential.
I guess. I don’t know what I would do without the desktop app and the cloud storage though. I just log in somewhere and everything is synced up and working.
It depends on your usage, for sure. For me, I’m more on the side of not seeing much there that’s valuable enough to subscribe to, though I’d probably pay a few bucks for the app just to support them. I think that if you’re happy with Google Podcasts, though, you’ll be happy with Pocket Casts without a subscription. It’s not like you have to pay for basic functionality, like downloading or queuing episodes, which is the evil version of the subscription model.
I have pocket casts set up the way I want it and, as I previously said, own the full featured product for life without extra costs. I just don’t see a reason to.
That’s fine. I was just saying if you wanted to recommend any other options to your friends who ask you, Podcast Republic on Android is a solid choice to consider. That’s all.
I feel like podcasts and their apps is what TV and movies should be.
Users pick the app they want to use. They optionally pay a fee or not. The app has any and all TV, Movies, music, etc. they want. In the back end, media rights holders have a pre-defined revenue split agreement.
Podcast Addict is not quite as streamlined, but has many more features.
My favorite feature is the “Automatic Rewind” combined with “Incremental rewind”. It adds a rewind everytime you pause and resume an episode that increases the longer the podcast has been paused. It means that if I briefly pause, for example to respond to. Some one in real life talking to me, then it will automatically rewind 5 seconds when I start the podcast again, so I can hear the sentence I was in the middle of in full. But if I leave a podcast alone for a week, then it will rewind 1 minute so I can get fully back into the context of what I was listening to.
I have used this for years now. It's really great. I have it set to skip the first 7 minutes of only certain podcasts because they usually have 7 - 8 minutes of ads. I also have it skip silences, which speeds up listening more than I first thought it would.
Podcast Addict is exactly the kind of app I wish were in vogue again. Rather than dropping features and hiding options in a race to be “streamlined”, it’s a properly designed piece of software in the classic sense: its a tool first and foremost. It prioritizes usability first, aesthetics second, and gives you all the buttons and levers to make it your own.
Like, it’s the kind of app where if you’re using it and think “eh I don’t like this one thing”, if you look in the settings, there’s probably a way to turn it off. God damn what I wouldn’t give for this to be common place design philosophy again.
This is exactly why I run Linux on all my computers, and run as much open-source software as I can, build my own home server, and set up my own home-automation. It does have a time cost, over convenience, but being able to tailor everything to my needs and wants is a wonderful feeling.
But yes, it would be wonderful if this was a more common mentality in software in general. Especially on mobile devices.
That time cost is spent optimizing, learning, and growing as an engineer. I wasn’t always a full time, highly paid system engineer. It started at home, and I marketed those skills.
fuck it, do gmail next, force me to find a proper provider
who exactly thinks it’s good that things are this ephemeral? what’s the point of even using and enjoying and getting invested in something when they constantly pull this shit?
Finding an alternative is the easy part. You can get yourself a domain on Namecheap, and get an email attached to it for pennies.
Issue is that a lot of services out there don’t consider alternative email providers as valid. Some as a protective measure against spam, some because… fuck knows why, honestly
Other than being relieved when they removed the podcast from Google play music (after shoehorning it into the GPM app for no good reason), I didn’t really use this much. Pocketcasts has pretty much always done what I needed.
I learned with Google music never get involved with Google with something you’ll want to use daily. Google music hands down was the absolute best music service I’ve ever used. Google is like a kid with ADHD bouncing around from project to project never to see them through.
I used it from the start, I got in on the beta, and while it was nice, I wouldn’t say “it was the absolute best”. IMO Spotify is just as good, in fact I’d say it’s better. It was nice that you could upload 20,000 of your own songs, but that was back before we had hundreds of gigs available on our phones.
For me it was the ability to upload my own library and stream it without a subscription, I ended up switching to plex and running my own server for a while but yeah Spotify just has the best deal with no effort so I caved to that especially with a family plan you can’t beat it.
IIRC Play Music was a paid service, it probably had a free tier with ads/commercials, but I definitely paid for it. That’s how I got grandfathered into YouTube Premium (when they launched YouTube Red as it was called it came “free” with the subscription to Play Music) and can’t go back to the free tier or deal with the various hacked clients and ad blockers. It’s been over a decade of ad-free YouTube (except for the sponsor segments everyone does now, I do use SmartTube on my Nvidia Shield to skip those).
As a former Google Play Music user and lover, it was the recommendations. I haven’t found another service that shows me even a significant fraction of the music I like that Google did. I’ve switched to Spotify but it constantly recommends songs I’ve already heard or don’t like and the shuffle feature gives me the same ~50 songs from a large playlist. It’s something I’ve accepted but I miss the Google recommendations deeply.
I’m the opposite, I never really used GPM’s recommendations because I knew what I liked and had tons of ripped CDs in my collection. After we all ditched MP3s and went to streaming I still stuck with what I knew. I only switched to Spotify about 2 years ago and it has opened me up to a bunch of smaller artists in Europe (I’m in the US) that I would have never found on my own. One of them (Green Lads) I’ve listened to for 2500 hours this past year thanks to their recommendations.
That’s the best one I found because of all the options. Prioritizing podcasts and auto downloading and adding them to the queue is so good. I listen to a news podcast that is like 10 minutes long everyday and I like that I could have it downloaded and play first on my commute then continue where I left off on the other podcasts without having to do it manually like with spotify
I use Spotify for my podcasts, but I will never check out YouTube Music podcasts. Having 2 ads before the start of a podcast as if I’m watching a YouTube video is just unacceptable for me.
Google seems to be caught in an awful feedback loop. I feel like at this point, most tech savy people are weary to try new Google services for fear of liking them, but eventually getting shutdown. In turn causing those tech savy users to not recommend it to their friends/family that actually might cause it to grow.
Honestly don’t know how they get out it without either losing tons of money on maybe side projects or happening across the one things that’s so good it’s impossible to not use. The latter seems more unlikely by the day
I use it, I like it and it works with zero issues. It also easily works with my Google Home speaker. So of course it gets shut down. Because obviously. Sigh.
That said, Pocket Casts on iOS is also quite decent.
Pocket Casts has both an Android and iOS version. If you pay for their “subscription” their web app also works, though I’ve never used it I’ve heard good things.
To their credit, at least they’re still trying to build stuff. Microsoft avoids this problem by no longer innovating and just buying into whatever is trending. (Not that Google also isn’t doing the same). If you never build anything new, you never risk killing a product that didn’t trend, which happens a lot.
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