So i literally today replaced my trusty old ipod touch that had served me well for many years with a new IOS 8 5th Generation Ipod.
All is well, with one glaring exception. Podcasts. Dear god what have they done with my beloved podcasts. They’ve taken podcasts out of the main Itunes app and placed it in it’s own little app.
I have spent the past hour playing around with it and it’s settings with increasing disbelief. As I am posting this outside the Barbecue Pit I shall not be able to express my opinion of this app in the terms it would require. Suffice it to say it has a 1 and a half star rating on Itunes and that extra half star seems absurdly generous.
So could people recommend some other podcast apps I could use. My requirements are modest, just some basic functionality. Stuff like actually showing your podcasts in alphabetical order, a little basic functionality and usability.
I don’t suppose there’s an app that replicates the old itunes functionality? One that just syncs up with your podcasts tab in Itunes. I listen to a lot of podcasts, many of which I’m not subscribed too, but ones i visit every now and then and cherrypick the interesting sounding episodes.
Obviously i can do that using an ipod with the right app but it wouln’t be as quick and easy. Basically i’ve got the old Itunes podcast set up just the way i like it.
I’m not aware of one that syncs up to the iTunes set of podcasts, but with Downcast, you can have a global setting that all new episodes of every subscribed podcasts get automatically downloaded, while still overriding that for individual podcast subscriptions, so that it just keeps the list refreshed but doesn’t automatically download anything. Then you can, on your iPod/iPhone, view the list of available episodes and choose which you want to download.
It’s not in iTunes, but I’ve found that it’s actually easier not to have to mess with iTunes for podcasts.
Well thanks for your help people. I’ll bookmark your suggestions for Plan B.
What’s Plan A you ask? Since I don’t listen to many audiobooks, i’m simply reclassifying podcasts as audiobooks. Obviously this means going into the ‘Get Info’ on each podcast I’ve downloaded and manually changing the type to podcast, but that literally takes seconds. So I now access my podcasts on my Touch though the Music -> Your Audiobooks route and bypass a podcast app entirely.
Smart speed is definitely better than 2x to me. It doesn’t sound sped-up, it just goes faster. Less important for audiobooks, because they’re well-produced, but smart speed greatly improves the… less-excellently produced podcasts out there.
I found that the built-in Podcast app was constantly doing screwy things. It was forgetting where I was. It was not marking things as played. It was not downloading episodes on time. Overcast is better.
Also, Overcast is better at differentiating between podcasts that I have episodes of on my phone, and ones that I don’t. The built-in app doesn’t, and I often don’t have a fast enough connection to download them on the fly.
Yeah I didn’t like it either when they removed podcasts from the main app. I switched to Downcast after trying a few others - I think it has the best feature set. You will need to subscribe to your podcasts in Downcast, and remove them from your itunes subscriptions (or stop syncing podcasts, if you want to stay subscribed in itunes).
and I’ll see you in Hell(IOS 9).