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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

The podcast app I really want:

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.

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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 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.

I haven't experienced the sync problems, but I believe you. Also, I use mobile the majority of the time so it's entirely possible I just don't use that feature enough to experience that pain.

> find the words inside the audio of any episode

Woah, that I didn't know about!

Another annoyance about the sync is that it is only recent episodes that are synced. When you get a new device you lose the status of most of your episodes.

+1 on subscribe from the beginning! I started listening to the British History podcast this year, and so far on PocketCasts I haven't found any decent way of managing listening to 5 year old episodes other than downloading them ten or so at a time. (So there's always the next one to listen to downloaded to my phone, rather than remembering episode numbers.)

> I started listening to the British History podcast this year

OT, but if you're interested in British History you might be interested in This Sceptred Isle. Most of it isn't available on iPlayer, but it should be in the usual places.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009t23k

There are four episodes of this available: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00qh19l/episodes/player

And available on Android. I miss Overcast.

+ social features of Breaker.

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