Posts about Android

Restart my phone

Wipe the SmartThings app data on my phone and login again

Restart the SmartThings Hub

Check app permissions on the phone: no optimization, fine location access always on.

SmartPlay allowed me to organize my 74 podcast feeds into 3 or 4 tiers. This allowed me to ensure the quick, timely podcasts were played first before the longer podcasts that could wait for days or weeks. I even managed to create one tier that played chronologically, which is opposite of all my other podcasts.

For each podcast, I could boost the volume, adjust speed, and have it only keep the latest so many episodes.

It had a button to skip the rest of a podcast to quickly get to the next one.

It liked to just stop playing and crash occasionally.

It was increasingly abandoned and unmaintained, so I didn’t trust it would continue to work when Android 13 hit my phone.

I could export my OPML file, but it went to a private filesystem that can no longer be accessed by file managers in newer versions of Android.

BeyondPod never updated to use the standard media controls and kept its old notification-based player.

There was a race-condition bug when skipping forward through the end of an episode: it would skip way into the next episode.

The catalog of podcasts has stopped working, so I could only add podcasts by URL, which is fine, but less convenient.

Podcast Addict can play at even faster speeds, though I’ve not taken advantage of these speeds: I’m still listening at 2-3x speeds.

For each podcast feed, I can set custom volume boost, speed, and auto cleanup by age or count of episodes.

When an episode is finished, it automatically moves it to a Recycle Bin or 24 hours, so I can go find it again if I want to refer to it again, or completed it by accident. In BeyondPod, I had to "delete played" occasionally for myself to give myself time to review and recover what’s been played.

I can assign a numeric priority to the podcasts and sort by it, so I can easily ensure my favorite podcasts play before others when they’re available just like BeyondPod’s SmartPlay, but even more conveniently.

"Smart Priorities" automatically increments a podcasts priority when I manually click an episode to play before others. In practice, this moved things around more than I wanted, so I disabled it and fine-tuned the priorities by hand as I saw them slightly out of order.

I can see artwork for each episode. I didn’t even know there was per-episode artwork.

I also never knew chapters were a thing in podcasts. Now I can see chapters for the couple podcasts that provide them.

Skip silence works well, but it’s super-weird for story podcasts, since it eliminates all hints of punctation.

These latest features are working really well, so I’m excited everytime I get to see the software in action. I expect to see even more features showing up in the frequent releases of Podcast Addict.

There’s a Getting Started guide which intuitively walked me through the things I’d likely want to configure, and I immediately recognized all the features I wanted. I was confident Podcast Addict would work for me, so I set it up completely, and signed up to pay the annual subscription fee to help make sure they keep updating it.

2022-09-23: Player→Settings→Controls→Skip Outro=95% let’s me hit the forward skip button in the last 5% of a podcast and finishes the whole episode instead of skipping only 20 seconds as it usually would. This saves a couple taps to get past the last bit of credits or closing music.