Posts about Podcasts

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.

All Songs Considered at NPR Podcasts

Echoes Interview Podcast for chill ambient electronic music

Song Exploder Podcast for extended discussion on the anatomy of a song

Shadowland the monthly Goth/Industrial party

DJ Neidermeyer for 80s and 90s Music I may have never known or had forgotten