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.
That’s why I never used it, because I knew it will happen. Better to use some other solution. I wish there was a third party option to google chromecast and all the home devices that works as well.
I hate that all the TCL TVs this year changed from Roku and Google this year to just Google. Give me some variety and competition. Also, I like their simpler out-of-the-box interface better with less ads and such, even though the Google TV interface is more customizable.
Yes they do. Usually one big ad on the side of the screen. And they may if you use certain screen savers. I think the city scapes one puts ads in it. Note: all the ads I mention are static images without sound.
Hoo BOY does Roku have ads! When I installed PiHole on my network and used it as my local DNS, the TOP blocked domain was “scribe.roku.com”. It was calling home like 5000 times a day. We were thinking every single remote push maybe.
Blocking those domains made the entire interface speed up drastically, and got rid of the giant box ads on the side as well. (It’s just a big empty frame now lol).
Rokus are nice and cheap if you can mitigate their rampant data harvesting.
What are you using for control? I wouldn’t mind scrapping my Roku for something a little more robust but using a mouse and keyboard on my home television seems kind of …awful.
I picked up a Logitech K400, it’s working well enough for now. I’m still evaluating the best use cases and access methods for everything but it’s good enough for when I need to just toss a browser up on my screen. Much more convenient than going to my PC in another room to cast a tab; I got tired of getting off the couch just b/c a stream needs to be refreshed.
Yeah, I have one of those at work on a central presentation machine. It does ok
Maybe my problem is more getting away from windows and moving to kodi or something. Trying to run a regular desktop GUI from across the room is just an uncomfortable thing.
FWIW I’m dealing with that issue, too. You can size things up and make it work okay but it’s not an amazing experience. I’m also looking at an alternative UI since the vast majority of what I want it for is browser based. I’m exploring some flavors of linux, but I have yet to encounter something that gives me the TV-like interface with PC functionality behind the scenes.
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 will never shut up about pocket casts. Their multi-device sync is wonderful. I can pick up where I left off on any episode from any of their apps. They’ve even got a pretty decent UWP app that I use on my Windows installs. They also have rock solid Chromecast support.
I loved it so much I bought the lifetime pass a long time ago. At any rate, I can’t recommend pocket casts enough!
Cheap? Unless someone snagged Pocketcasts when it was still a one off payment app, it is NOT cheap. Heck, I can pay for YouTube Premium, Spotify Premium and still have money left for one more streaming service to plug into before I hit what Pocketcasts wants me to pay. The app is good but it is the very antithesis of cheap.
I’m paying 119 SEK/year for the Plus tier, which is the result of a price raise some time ago as well. But I see now that it’s 533 SEK/year all of a sudden for new customers.
Still, that’s not too expensive, honestly. If you need the features, it’s pretty good.
I don’t, so I won’t pay that amount of my account is put on that price point…
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.
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.
It’s the only one that I’ve found that has Smart Play. I’m not sure why not all podcast players have this, it’s such a great feature. Going back to something without it, would feel like going back to the stone age.
I recently noticed it has the option to import/export your subscriptions, which is useful for backups or if the podcast app you’re migrating from supports the .opml file format too.
I recently stopped using this. I prefer paying for things so I know they will be taken care of, but their price increases came without any improvements to the service for a while. If you are okay with paying though, it’s pretty good.
AntennaPod is free and has worked well for me so far as a replacement. It isn’t as intuitive with its discovery feature, but it works well enough.
Years ago, Google shut down services I used and since then, I don’t get involved in anything they put out there on the market. This will include their AI service.
Only thing they are allowed to provide me is email. I’m even using YT and search drastically less.
Yeah I don’t directly use any Google service that I’m not paying for. They either shut it down monetize the hell out of it or change how it works so that I have to change how I do things.
Why even use their email? It’s not encrypted so you’re the only one who can read it. They can read it too, and they do. They scan your email and use it to target ads at you. Bought something? They collect that data and look at the receipt, exactly how much you spent on each item. That’s creepy and weird.
Recommend switching to an encrypted email provider like Skiff, Proton, or Tuta. I’ve used all, but really digging Skiff at the moment.
They aren’t using my emails for anything interesting as far as I can tell. Google ad sense either recommends I buy something that I bought months ago and don’t need another one or recommends me content that I have zero interest in. I get so many ads for Epoch Times and Hillsdale.
FOSS and privacy are 2 completely different things. If Gmail software was FOSS his points would still be relevant. Try to dislike people for the right reasons at least.
Hey, makes no difference to me. There are a lot of reasons to protect yourself and your privacy online. Ads is one. Government snooping is another. Hackers stealing your data is another. Rogue employees snooping on your data is another (countless stories of Facebook employees reading their exes private messages, I’m sure it’s happened at Google too). Being logged into Gmail makes it possible to track you on nearly any website you visit since Google trackers can phone home with your unique identifiers is another!
Good UX is a piss-poor reason to not care for your digital privacy, not just because it’s less important than the nuts and bolts, but because there are providers that offer encryption with good UX. Skiff is on par with Gmail. Proton isn’t far off. They both offer free tiers. Skiff almost offers the same amount of free storage as Gmail. The only difference is you don’t have that gross feeling like someone could stalk you on every website you visit, or read your messages.
Just advising you to use protection, for your benefit. But go ahead, bang the hooker without a condom. It doesn’t impact me in the slightest whether you heed this advice. I say this as someone who was one of the earliest adopters of Gmail. I had a Gmail account before they were publicly available. I don’t use that shit anymore.
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 was looking for you “OMG GOOGLE IS KILLING EVERYTHING!” people. They don’t have infinite money, stuff costs money to run and if it isn’t as popular as their other services obviously they’d shut it down. People use their products for free (monetarily) for years and then bitch and complain when something gets shut down, never having paid a cent.
Yeah, some things that cost money were killed off, but that’s what happens when they try making everything. Most people have never paid a dime to Google.
Another service that I didn’t know google even offered until they announced it was dying. There are so many sources that podcast apps can pull from that we don’t need half as many as we have.
Podcasts are just mp3s (or whatever other audio format like ogg). Authors/pod casters should just host them on their site and be done with it. Why let some other company take a lion share of your ad profit. We need less centralized services and more distributed services. Use lemmy or mastodon to promote them. :)
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.
My understanding is it is a file linked to your account that links to the epub file. It lets you and only you download your copy of the epub file you purchased.
I’ve tried to listen to some podcasts on YouTube music. It really doesn’t work well compared to Pocket Casts. They need to separate the music and podcasts more clearly and make managing podcast playlists more intuitive
My favorite part of YT Music is how it’s a terrible interface for YT videos. Second favorite part is the total mixing of music playlists and video playlists.
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