Podcast List for November 2022

03 November 2022

I have 73 feeds I currently follow. I have a whole system of prioritization, so I can listen to important things first. I’ve listed them alphabetically here:


Podcast Addict

24 August 2022

I’ve used BeyondPod for over 10 years, since my first Android phone, to download, organize, and play podcasts. For at least the past 4 years, maintenance and updates to the application have slowed to a crawl. I had paid a one-time fee for the application, so I guess I couldn’t think they owed me updates forever.

I would try to find a replacement every once in a while, but the other podcatchers always lacked some feature upon which I relied. Even Podcast Addict fell short the last time I tried it about 4 years ago, but it’s been getting lots of updates.

BeyondPod: The Good Parts That Kept Me Coming Back

  • 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.

Downsides of BeyondPod

  • 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.

Enter Podcast Addict

  • 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.

I made the transition, and I love Podcast Addict. Listening to podcasts is easily my #1 pastime, so it’s important that I found the perfect software.

Updates

  • 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.


Listening to Music

30 August 2020

My Music Library

I have a good bit of music I had acquired and ripped in the late 90s and had purchased from Amazon later. That all lives in a directory on my big computer. I never play anything from there, and it just sits there for safe keeping.

I continued to purchase DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon Music, and I eventually embraced their "free" streaming with Amazon Prime. I could add available music to my collection for free, and then stream it along with the stuff I bought, so it’s nice and blended. This allowed me to easily toss a new album or artist into rotation, and if I really want, I might purchase it to keep.

The Prime streaming service had some limitations with some music I wanted to sample being unavailable, and sometimes, I’d notice some of the free music disappeared from my collection. I decided to pay the little bit for the Unlimited Music plan, and that made almost everything available. I notice very few cases of music becoming unavailable, so now I don’t bother buying downloadable MP3s except in rare cases where I want to be able to use a song on another device outside the Amazon Music client.

Music Discovery

I don’t really use the stations at all on Amazon Music. I don’t feel the need to hear large numbers of new songs all the time, so I have a smaller curated list of podcasts and DJs where I discover new music to add to my collection at Amazon:

Alternatives

I had uploaded all my music to Google Play Music years ago, but there had always been news of the service’s eventual demise. It’s finally migrated recently over to YouTube Music, and they seem to have reintroduced the ability to upload my own music. I’ve paid for YouTube Premium, so I have YouTube Music as well, and this could be a nice alternative. I have a few albums uploaded there which I can’t find on Amazon. I don’t think I can buy music there, though, and I’ve already purchased a good bit of (DRM-free) music on Amazon.


Tiniest USB Stick

13 December 2010

I made the tiniest USB drive for my car using the elago microSD card reader and a 16G microSD card—it's more of USB nub than a stick, but it's big enough to hold my entire music collection I've collected over the years. The USB port on the new Fiesta is in the middle console out in the open, so I wanted the smallest device for it, so it wouldn't be damaged.


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