Help me use Howl/Stitcher for podcasts

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been listening to podcasts for years on ITunes, IPods, and my IPhone’s Podcast app. It works fine, but there are many small things that bug me.

I’d stick with it, but recently I subscribed to Howl so that I could listen to the back episodes of What the Fuck With Marc Maron.

I hadn’t had that for very long before Howl merged with Stitcher and now every time I open Howl, it prompts me to switch to Stitcher. At some point I accepted.

I’m trying to figure out how to use all these things most efficiently.

I might have specific questions later, but does anyone have thoughts or advice?

2

Here are the functions I’d like to have:

  1. A database by podcast title, which can be rearranged in various ways

  2. A database by podcast episodes, which can be rearranged in various ways

  3. A way to make one (or more) playlists, which I can rearrange manually or automatically

  4. A way to search either podcasts or episodes, and from the search, download or more episodes of a podcast, download all the episodes, subscribe to a podcast, play an episode, or add episodes to a playlist
    — This is one frustration I have with Apple iPhone Podcasts app—from search results, I can download an episode, but I can’t add it to the (only) playlist. I have to download it, then go back to the database, find the episode and then hit “play next” or “add to up next.” The problem is that if it’s an old episode of a podcast for which I’ve downloaded a lot of episodes, it’s hard to find. The only way is to scroll through the episodes in reverse order. There’s no “most recently downloaded” or “search within podcast” function.

  5. From above, a way to search within each podcasts for a particular episode

Unfortunately, neither Howl nor Stitcher seems to be very intuitive, and what makes it more difficult is that the desktop versions seem to have different capabilities from the mobile app versions.

Also, not everything I favorited in Howl seems to be showing up in Stitcher favorites.

3

Oh and another big thing about the IPhone Podcast “up next” list that drives me nuts is that if you’re reordering your list by dragging episodes up and down, if you touch the episode the wrong way, it can read that as a “play this episode now,” both kicking your current episode out of rotation midway though and also deleting the entire up next queue.