61–70 of 204 posts
I'm so glad to see the team behind Pocket Casts find success. It's one app I've never been disappointed with and supported right from the beginning. The paramount quality of a good app is how easily it gets out of the way and lets you enjoy the content. Pocket Casts has done a spectacular job at that.
I've been frustrated with many free podcast apps so I paid for Pocket Casts and I've been happy since. I think it's a smart move by NPR et al. What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server. NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using i…
I just came here to say how much I enjoyed reading the list of changes every time there is an update. There is always something super funny in there. I really hope they keep doing that!
This strikes me as potentially bad news. PocketCasts is a great little app, with the characteristic advantages of being produced by a small indy outfit with no agenda beyond selling a good quality product for cash. I'll keep an open mind, but it's hard to imagine it maintaining its current user-focus and content neutrality while under the thumb of content-producers. [Edit: there's a blog post on the topic from Shifty…
I mean, it wasn't acquired by a for-profit publishing house or media company (e.g. a music label, Netflix, Amazon, etc.), it's NPR. They aren't for-profit, and they generally have pretty solid products (or at least content) in my experience. I'm not gonna say that there isn't cause for concern that an organization like NPR might not be very good at this sort of development or product, but I don't think naked greed or…
@peterjlee's other post here also suggests also that NPR's own current app is spyware. I have no idea whether or not that's true, but if so, it augurs badly.
We'll see. I'd be delighted if my suspicions turn out to be entirely wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also love Pocket Casts, particularly with the "skip pauses" feature. Often podcasts are full of short pauses... to date, I have saved 9 hours of time with the feature enabled!
I’ve saved 18 hours, and over 2 days by playing at 1.5x speed! Whoa. I listen to podcasts more than I thought!
"Pocket Casts users will continue to enjoy: A wide variety of podcasts from hundreds of national and international producers;" I hope this is just an unintentional underrepresentation of how many podcast producers are out there (many thousands, not just hundreds) and doesn't mean they're limiting which podcasts can be listened to in Pocket Casts.
It's possible it's just a count of how many podcasts are included in the "Discover" section. I don't know what the process for getting added to that is. It covers almost all of the "big" podcasts, but there are a handful of local ones I've had to add manually.
I wonder if that changes.
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Can you clarify what features are missing? I use both the Android and the Web versions of Pocket Casts and it syncs, trims silence, does speed adjustments, and so forth.
The syncing in pocketcasts is not reliable, especially between web and mobile apps. Often a played episode on mobile will still register as new on the web, even days later. Sometimes forcing a sync fixes it, but that is not 100% either. Overcast has the syncing perfected, but it has a much worse web UI. Pocketcasts new web UI is much slower too, with more clicks, popup windows, and less information density. I use the…
> find the words inside the audio of any episode
Woah, that I didn't know about!
I've been frustrated with many free podcast apps so I paid for Pocket Casts and I've been happy since. I think it's a smart move by NPR et al. What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server. NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using i…
> What they want is the usage data like where they pause, where they skip, etc. That's exactly what I don't want > These data were traditionally not available to podcast publishers because podcast is really just an mp3 file uploaded to some server. Good. Long may it remain so.
I think I've tested all the major podcasts app out there, paid for their subscriptions etc... The one that was clearly over the others has always been Pocket Casts. I'm also a subscriber of https://play.pocketcasts.com , their web platform. I just love them. I'm really happy that they've made the money they deserve (or I hope they did anyway). That being said, I don't feel confident at all that NPR will now respect m…
Important to note that it’s not NPR per-se, but a group including NPR.