I will be getting my first “real” smartphone on Thursday - a Samsung Galaxy III Mini. While I’m sure I’ll figure out the new functionality overtime, there’s one thing I’d like to ask you all about: podcasts.
For the past couple years, I’ve listened to podcasts (and other talks on mp3 files that I label as podcasts) on my Nokia. I subscribe to the various podcast sites on my RSS reader, see the summaries and then decide which episodes seem interesting, and download those to a folder on my computer. I copy that folder over to my phone, create a new folder on the computer and when I’m done with that folder on the phone, I copy the new folder over.
On the phone itself, I listen in order of the files in the folder. The Nokia recognizes podcasts as such, and so unlike music, if I pause the podcast and go to a different file, when I go back to the earlier podcast it remembers where I was.
I suppose in simpler terms, I’m looking for a way to continue copying files from my computer to my phone (instead of automatic subscriptions), but having the phone treat the files as podcasts instead of songs.
This isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but this morning I finally tried Stitcher, and I really like it so far. It’s already performing far better than my iPhone’s podcast app.
It looks like they have a desktop version and it automatically syncs with your phone, so you could use that to search for stuff on your computer, then listen to it on the go.
I have a Galaxy s2 and I’ve been very happy with BeyondPod, which was well worth the six bucks or whatever it was I paid for it. It’s been a year since I looked, but none of the free podcatchers out there were worth any more than the price.
A second for DoggCatcher. There’s a free version you can try to see if you like it. I subscribe to feeds through it, and let it download and manage the sound files for me.
I tend to listen to feeds in broadcast order, which it will do automatically. Occasionally I’ll look through the upcoming episodes, and if there’s one I’m not interested in then I’ll mark it as listened to, so doggcatcher will delete the audio file.
Its default is to delete episodes even if you haven’t listened to them, if they disappear from the feed. Fortunately that can be over ridden for shows like This American Life, which do that. Then it will keep episodes until you listen to them (or forever if that’s what you want).
It seems like youy’re trying your hardest to keep things as complicated as possible. There’s a much easier solution.
Most, if not all, major Android podcast apps (Doggcatcher, BeyondPod, Pocket Casts (what I use,)) have the option to NOT automatically download new podcasts. So it will check the RSS feeds for new ones, and list them, and then when you open the app you decide whether or not to download it based on the episode description. You can then even mark un-downloaded/un-played ones as “played” so it won’t ever notify you that that episode is “new” again.
And every podcast app I’ve used keeps track of each podcast individually, so you can listen to one halfway through, stop, listen to another, or some music, etc… and when you go back each podcast you listened to will start back up where you left off.
It saves you the steps of having to download them on your PC, only to transfer them to your phone and set up some sort of “virtual podcast feed” using a local folder.
I agree that transferring files from the PC to the phone is a hassle. However, not every mp3 I listen to is published as a podcast. So I need that functionality, even though I will try to subscribe to my regular podcasts using an app.
I tried Doggcatcher, but I could not figure out how to get it to play any imported mp3s. Beyondpod, with a little tweaking, did provide this (called a “virtual feed”) and so that’s what I"m going with for now.