I have always been an Apple Podcasts user, but am currently trying out a year of Overcast premium so I can download and play my DRM-free audiobooks on my watch.
I still use Apple Podcasts for searching and discovering new shows or episodes… sometimes I want to find podcast episodes where someone was an interview guest - in Apple Podcasts, it’s as easy as searching that person’s name.
On a recent episode of Under The Radar, Marco mentions that they’re doing a full Overcast rewrite… so hope for fuller feature support is always in the future… this isn’t a podcast I normally listen to, but it did turn out to be a good way to hear about Overcast development Under the Radar #280: Upstream Decisions - Relay FM
I agree search if best on Apple Podcasts. But I couldn’t sort from oldest to newest which can be really annoying and it always feels like it’s trying to suggest me stuff instead of giving me easy access to the stuff I chose to be in there myself.
I believe Marco’s only delisted a couple of podcasts that he thought should have been removed by iTunes already. He doesn’t block any search queries. I’m pretty sure Cindy would not have been looking for those shows so was probably a technical/index issue.
Pretty sure Marco and I are on a similar political wavelength, so I don’t think that’s the issue here.
I’m much more likely to be looking for yet another productivity podcast. Come to think of it, maybe this lack of good search is more of a feature than a bug, in this case.
Now if I could just stop typing “Outcast” when I’m trying to find “Overcast” that would be great. I’ve spoken to my brain, and I hope to come to some kind of understanding.
Ah, in Downcast you can’t sort from oldest to newest either, it seems. I have that situation fairly often, where I want to access the first episodes of a podcast first and when it’s a show with many episodes that can be really annoying without sorting options.
I‘ll look into some alternatives (again). Pocket Casts is probably the most promising. I‘m not used to work with a queue and that app seems to be designed a lot around that feature, but maybe I‘ll get used to it. The subscription fee is to much for my taste. But actually it’s almost not necessary to subscribe. Only folders would be a nice to have.
Will also look into Castro. Again, the subscription is to high for my taste. But maybe not necessary.
I‘m really willing to pay for a well developed podcast app, as I did with Overcast, but it needs to be reasonable.
Other suggestions I should try out?
I also downloaded „Podcast Guru“ and „Pods“, just because they made a fair impression in the App Store. But there are so many!
this is usually how I explain one of the big differences between overcast and downcast. the downcast dev responds immediately and is super helpful. my other big overcast annoyance was how the dev doesn’t let you pick exactly how many back episodes you want to keep. he gives you a choice of what he thinks the amounts should be.
Just looking at Castro and it seems pretty good. And the subscription is less than I thought. I‘ll try Castro, Pocket Casts and Podbean in the next days and then decide.
I decided to go with Castro. It seems pretty feature complete and I like the idea of curating your inbox to a queue and downloading only what’s in it. It’s a new approach for me, but I always have to delete podcasts that add up because of space. And I am notoriously binge listening to stuff I‘m currently interested in and piling up others. So this approach actually suits me, I just have to get used to it.
I am sometimes concerned about filling up my iPhone with unplayed podcasts, because I have Overcast to download new episodes as they arrive, and because I subscribe to more podcasts than I listen to.
However:
It’s never happened, and I’ve been listening to podcasts for many years now, since the pre-iPhone time when you had to download them to your Mac in iTunes and then manually transfer to your PalmPilot.
If it does ever become an issue, there’s a somewhat-hidden setting in Overcast that will delete all downloads. Just do that, and then start fresh.
Bad time to start evaluating (or maybe a good time, if this is how it’s going to be.) They’ve had a feed refresh and podcast search outage since late Saturday. Pretty ridiculous.
Doesn’t seem to be a global problem – I received new episodes in the last days.
I just had one very odd instance where of a specific podcast (which I imported as all the others) Castro showed me only the first 13 episodes even though there are about ten more. I manually deleted and added the RSS feed again and after several tries suddenly I got the correct feed with all the episodes.
