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 using Antennapod for over a year now and it a great podcast app and does a lot of stuff the paid ones won't even do, including syncing what episodes I've listened to to gpodder.net, searching iTunes and other websites and just having an easy to use, simple UI.
It's just a shame that these FOSS apps which have much lower overheads as well, just can't market themselves as a commercial proprietary application like Pocket Casts can.
[Edit: there's a blog post on the topic from ShiftyJelly: https://blog.shiftyjelly.com/. It's a little misjudged in tone, maintaining their jokiness which has been enjoyable in other contexts but feels more like misdirection when a user is hoping for information on the future. Perhaps mildly reassuring though]
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 exploitation needs to be a significant concern. And more than any content producer I can think of, I'd trust NPR to maintain relative neutrality towards external content.
@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.
I use pocketcasts daily and share your unease at anything changing. But. It looks like things may stay broadly the same so maybe we have nothing to worry about?
Translation: we're going to start tracking listeners' behavior.
> And yet despite this remarkable renaissance, the listening experience — particularly around discovery — has remained virtually unchanged. Pocket Casts will enable us to forge a closer relationship with our listeners
Translation: the podcast ecosystem being built on open, decentralized standards limits what we can do (see above), so we're going to use the market position we just acquired to "extend" it with proprietary features.
Just tell people to use a FOSS podcast app like Antennapod and to avoid closed silo listings and move on.
That being said, I don't feel confident at all that NPR will now respect my privacy as much as Pocket Cast, the company. I'm really scared that NPR will change the app like all those media companies do when they acquire something good - that is transforming the tool into an ad machine, or at the minimum something to track users.
Despite the blog post where they announce that nothing will change, I hope Pocket cast's team will continue their good work and resist the pressure of a media company.
NPR has the NPR One app but I guess not enough people are using it. They've been open about what data they're collecting and I honestly don't mind NPR knowing about my podcast listening habits.
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.
It's annoying enough having to get my phone out of my pocked to press the fast forward button. If the ads were unskippable, I'd switch apps immediately.
- 1 day 5 hours from skipping - 25 days 19 hours from variable speed - 1 day 12 hours from remove silence - 8 hours 28 minutes from skipping intros
I'm most surprised by hour much "remove silence" has saved me.
Additionally you won't have any new requirement to create a new account or pull analytics from your listening habits as you mentioned towards the end.
Source for AntennaPod: https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod
If so, I wonder if they're going to cram livestreaming into Pocket Casts. That'd be enough for me to switch to something else, I much prefer apps that do a single thing extremely well.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/03/npr-decides-it-wont-promote...
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 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.
I finally gave up on the Apple app years ago after it was unable to sync my place for the 1200th time.
Never had that issue with Overcast.
I've always worried a bit that Shifty Jelly's model would prove unsustainable with money from new sales needed to continue paying for their servers and I've felt at times that they were strapped for resources, so this overall seems positive to me.
Can you name a few specific ways in which you think this is true? (I personally think it's come a long way from the awful skeuomorphic reel-to-reel metaphor, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.)
Well, that sucks.
In a world full of free stuff, this is the only piece of paid software that makes my day better. They deserve this.
Important to note that it’s not NPR per-se, but a group including NPR.
> “We turned them down because the unique thing about this opportunity is the mission driven nature of these organizations. They want what’s best for the podcasting space, they want to build open systems that everyone can use.”
The initial headline had me worried but I like the tone of the press release and have no reason to doubt the intentions of Shift Jelly or NPR. I hope they continue to improve what I feel is the best medium to consume podcasts that currently exists.
One thing that annoys me, when I go to a new Podcast I like to listen from the beginning, and Pocket Casts marks old episodes as "Played" so it's hard to go through and listen to them in order as I forget where I've gone to.
Any solution for stopping the app marking these old podcasts as played?
If you're having issues with Pocket Casts marking old episodes as played when new ones come out, go into the settings (either for the whole app, or for a particular podcast) and turn off "Auto Cleanup".
The perfect syncing and playback (speed + silence) of Overcast, with the fast (older) web UI of PocketCasts, with the searching abilities of CastBox.
Someone please make this.
I use both the Android and the Web versions of Pocket Casts and it syncs, trims silence, does speed adjustments, and so forth.
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 web interface during work, when I dont have my phone and just to browse quicker so speed and functionality are important.
Castbox has a great search interface that can find the words inside the audio of any episode, which is absolutely great for discovery.
Also there should be a simple subscribe button with 2 options: subscribe from latest episode, or subscribe from the beginning. Pocketcasts has a very strange way of changing subscribing to episodes just from sorting them differently.
- Let me search within a podcast (search titles as well as descriptions). I just found out about Planet Money but it has nearly 1000 episodes. The internet can help be find highly recommended episodes, but there’s no easy way to jump to these in the app.
- please let me set playback speed.
I also have a faint hope that this acquisition would allow Pocket Casts to go open source.
Play a podcast episode and tap on the "now playing" bar to open up this screen http://i.imgsir.com/1OMb.jpg
The settings are hiding here http://i.imgsir.com/GZAL.jpg
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!
But you can use RSS to listen to new episodes, so I wouldn't say they don't want us to listen to their podcast.
Good old fashioned entertainment in 2018.
Time for me to start looking for another podcasting app...
But it feels weird to me knowing that I donated money to NPR, and that money might be used to purchase a private company.
I just feel like when they are doing the on air campaigns the plea's feel like they are desperate. Without your support this content wouldn't exist.
I just don't really expect them to have the budget to make that content, and ALSO make sure I can enjoy it in an application that is better than Apple's default podcast app. Or Stitcher on the web.
I enjoy the app, and I am glad they are making sure its available. But they next time I hear that they desperately need my money to continue... I'm going to think... "Ya, do you really?".
I don't think it was from donations, but I could be wrong
You can argue that donations to local NPR stations helps free up revenue for NPR the organization, but donations don't directly translate in to anything that NPR does.
Call me a cynic but I have a feeling their bias (and questionable tech capabilities) will drive it down to the ground.
I love NPR’s content, yet I am still worried about my favorite posdcast app getting aquired. I guess there will still be overcast if it goes down badly, but that would be a shame.
