if overcast is on my iPhone and the files are on my iPhone, it’s not efficient to upload them somewhere else to listen to them. Yes I think I chose the right word.
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this is a weird limitation, but can’t you do from safari on your phone?
there are numerous ways to do it, thats not the point.
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Fwiw, I also hate it when apps make me out a file in the cloud in order to use it locally (unless the point is cloud syncing). I also think of it as absurd to do things that way.
If it works for others, hey, great, go for it. But for me, it’s absurd.
It’s an interesting paradigm collision. General audio players and podcast clients don’t necessarily have much to do with each other, despite both playing audio. Overcast essentially loads your sideloaded file into a custom feed, which means it handles all audio the same. That can be hard for people who feel opening an audio file locally is a default behavior or mandatory for the developer, when it actually requires special consideration. Also, Overcast does sync sideloads.
Absolutely. But assuming you’re making software for users, that “despite both playing audio” thing is everything.
For me as a user, a podcast player is an audio player. I want one that both plays feeds and local files. 
(In fact, while I used Downcast for a while, I now use Castro for feeds and Bound to read my own audio files – because I can keep them in the cloud service I normally would and just listen to them there.)
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Yes, but I understand that’s sometimes necessary due to the design of IOS.
this is doubtful as Downcast has no problem importing audio files and making them appear as “just another podcast” complete with cover art, and obeying all the rules set for “true podcasts”.
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I wasn’t referring specifically to Overcast. Just the fact that some apps are limited to what they can and cannot do with files because of limitations imposed by Apple. I’m sure they have a good reason for most of them.
Thanks, I had not heard of Bound. I use BookPlayer which works great in Carplay and the dev supports M1 macs.
That’s a good setup. I use Castro’s sideloads myself for YouTube tips etc, but I don’t like the iCloud drive import method all that much since files don’t always appear quickly. A player that just connects to an S3 bucket would be ideal for those, most likely, so rips can be handled quickly remotely.
As for wanting both kinds of audio players in one app, I can’t get my point across, but if you look at other app categories, you’ll see there is usually a small market for apps that mash multiple sub-categories of apps together. I get that it seems unfair to not have everything you want in every app, but there’s development time involved and the opportunity cost of checking all boxes is a deeper or higher quality feature set in the area the app is best at.
I have no interest in apps that mash everything together. But as a user “play audio from a feed” and “play audio from a file” don’t seem that different – especially because every podcast player I’ve used primarily down loads the audio from a feed and stores it as a local file in the end anyway.
Is there a lot of under the hood difference between loading a locals file and turning a feed into a local file? I’ve done enough coding to believe there is, and it probably helps explain why podcast apps aren’t usually great at sideloading. But as a user, it seems will that I can play audio from one source and not another.
The new version is a change that I’ve found jarring, but I’m going to take some time with it to find out if it’s just that things have changed and I’ll get used to them, or that things have regressed in a way that will make me look elsewhere.
However, if you really want to get Arment’s attention, refer to the UI changes as “Alan Dye inspired” 
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I think so, too. At minimum a second flow through the app for files needs to be developed, which takes more time than dropping the custom audio into the top of a custom feed that gets imported the same as everything else. Lack of feed context needs to be dealt with somehow (extracting ID3, or showing no information gracefully.)
Default system modals/controls only save so much time, and can create unmet expectations about the ephemerality of the sideload (e.g. Overcast needs to communicate that it’s going to queue and remember your file in a way that an app like Quicktime doesn’t.)
Not impossible to deal with, but given a dev who will expend only so much effort (Marco), I think most users would rather see podcast-centric aspects like playlist management or sped-up audio quality optimized.
What’s the difference between Mark as Played and Delete?
In earlier versions of Overcast, if there was an episode I wasn’t interested in, I just deleted it. What benefit/difference is there in marking it as played?
Marking it played removes it from the playlist/available list and also gives it a Played status as if you listened or scrubbed to the end.
In this screenshot, Casey’s episode has been marked as played, and the previous episode played to the end on its own. Matthew’s episode was deleted so it doesn’t have the played status.
The benefit is essentially for people who browse a show’s back catalog. Marking played lets them know they’re done or not interested. Delete means they may want to try the episode again later.
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After using Castro for over a month, I reverted to Overcast. The time using a different app allowed me to break the muscle memory and I’ve not accidentally marked any podcasts as played since.
Castro was OK but management of Podcasts and ordering of such was far too fiddly.
I am still really annoyed that there’s no way to get an action to add to playlist on the drop down drawer, it means that I have to use extra taps to get what I want multiple times a day.
I suppose it’ll have to make do for now.
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How’s the return to Overcast working for you? I can’t seem to find a queue that shows me what the next episodes lined up to play are? (There seems to be a list called ‘Queue’ but that’s unrelated to what’s actually lined up!)
I’m back in the swing of things.
You have to play a podcast from a playlist to get the order in the playlist.
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I like Overcast a lot more now than I did pre-update, but I still prefer Pocket Casts.
At the moment, I love the “New Releases” filter in Pocket Casts. I wake up in the morning, view that filter, and archive or queue episodes to deal with them immediately, and everything goes into one, simple queue.
Overcast sounds a shade better, and I like the fact the feeds update faster then with Pocket Casts, but the way PC work just aligns better with me. Overcast does seem clunky, especially when you have a lot of new episodes and you’re trying to quickly make sense of everything. I feel like I can do that much faster in PC.
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