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Comment by ThisIsTheWay | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit I'm a podcast novice, but what player are you using and what does it offer beyond Spotify? I find, download, and play podcasts through Spotify without issues, and the few features I need (speed adjustment, offline access, and show notes/links) are all available on Spotify.

If there is a better way to listen, I'd love to hear about it.

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I use PocketCasts (on iOS) and I'm happy enough to pay for a subscription (extra benefits are marginal though).

It's less about features, I think, and more about the overall experience. It's probably quite personal too, but in no particular order:

- Smoother and more responsive UI

- Less cluttered and more dense UI eg visual overview of all my subscriptions

- Silence trimming

- Sharing from a given place in a podcast

I do use Spotify for music though so I'm not completely anti the Spotify experience. In fairness to the Spotify designers I do think that they have a more difficult job in integrating podcasts into an app that is mainly a music player.

I use it on Android and also quite happy with it after years of use.

Another user of PocketCasts (Android and Windows).

In addition to the above, I make use of

- podcast specific auto download, retention, and playback settings

- clean Android Auto integration. When I switch from Pandora to PocketCasts, it's quite clear what is happening. It intelligently handles pausing/resuming playback while notifications are playing. Even rewinding a little if it's been a bit since you listened.

- Progress sync, so I can pickup where I was on different versions of the app. (Desktop/Web/Android)

- Fast refresh of feeds. Your phone asks their server for the status rather than calling each server individually. This was a bigger issue back in the day.

I use Pocket Casts. I just like it a lot, and I don't want to switch because it does everything I need. Spotify seems like it wouldn't be as configurable, but I haven't even felt the need to check.

Plus, I don't like a monoculture.

>I just like it a lot, and I don't want to switch because it does everything I need. Spotify seems like it wouldn't be as configurable

Maybe I'm missing out on part of the experience. What else is there to do with a podcast other than download/stream and listen?

- Thanks for all the tips. I don't listen to a ton of podcasts but I'll give it a shot.

Chapter support is a nice feature when it's available. There are some podcasts that I listen to straight through. I skip around others.

Not the parent commenter, but there's a lot of features I like out of Pocket Casts that Spotify doesn't do as well.

- Queuing/auto-queuing to a next-up playlist (with features like add to start or add to end)

- Faster playback (e.g. listening at 2x speed)

- Alerts when new episodes drop to a given feed

It's very configurable and works well.

Also, I just dislike having to abandon my music queue when I listen to a podcast on Spotify. It's nice to have music playing at home, pause it, go for a walk listening to a podcast, finish the walk, then resume the same song/playlist at home.

Well, why are we not coding on laptops from 1994?

The user interface can be wildly different.

Pocket casts changed recently but oh how I lived the old ui. Spotify had nothing on it.

Haven't had a reason to download Spotify since even though I haven't liked all the changes in the new pocket casts.

I believe (though I'm not sure) that AntennaPod is closer to the old Pocket Casts UI (but not as polished):

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

Your snarky response isn't helpful. You've only said "it's different" and dismissed Spotify while also not giving any reasons why you dislike it.

I don't dislike it. I'm happy with my podcast player and don't want two of them since I want to keep using the one with the interface I like.

Other things than the pure content matter. It's not irrelevant.

Playback speed, how many episodes to download on each podcast (some I listen to often, some rarely), what do with them when done, when to go to the next episode automatically, there's a lot. And I want these configurable per-podcast.

Some apps also have the ability to compress silent gaps in audio which can save a lot of time over time. It may not work if you’re listening to things that need ‘comedic timing’ but otherwise it’s entirely seamless.

I’ve been using Apple’s app recently and its the one thing I quite miss.

Also configurable speed controls + skipping whitespace + easier to skip ads (Spotify podcasts break out the ads into their own streams so you can't skip them all in one go, though you can skip them individually).

Other nice features I haven’t seen mentioned

- sort by most liked - save clips

Favoriting episodes, bookmarks, auto-queues, prioritizing podcasts, downloading episodes for archival purposes, playback history, list of all episodes in progress, stripping empty audio, crazy amount of configurability, and an interface that isn't terrible. I'm sure there are a bunch of other features I'm forgetting.

I've tried Spotify. It's not a podcast player. It's an audio player with none of the conveniences of a modern podcast player. If all you want to do is listen to podcasts, I'm sure it's fine, but it's not in any way sufficient for my needs. At this point, Podcast Addict is the only app out there that I can stand to use.

You're not missing out on anything. The Pocket Casts UI is impenetrable and I can never remember how to tell which podcasts are downloaded, which I've listened to, etc. There's some overlap with the "archive" feature that is unintuitive.

I tweeted at the Pocketcasts team to recommend adding a feature that I would find useful (I think it was excluding "the" from alphabetised list of podcasts since it made titles clump together under "T"). They responded quickly and implemented it pretty soon afterwards. I was impressed.

I love the web player interface (although have found problems using a VPN) but the Android app has been a bit tricky to use, having to navigate to filters to find episodes I've downloaded.

Don't know about the competition, but PocketCasts has a lot of options in the share feature I use. Share podcast, share episode, share episode at this point. I'll often times send a share text saying "listen to the next 3 minutes".

I would love to support Pocket Casts, but I don't want to pay another subscription (Pocket Casts plus appears to be $1/mo). Do you know if there's any way to just pay $12 for Plus forever or something like that? Or another podcast app that has that kind of one-time purchase?

I use Overcast (https://overcast.fm/) which I believe has a one-time purchase fee to remove ads. It also has pretty nice features such as audio boost and silence trimming.

Is there a feature you want out of the paid subscription, or do you just want to support them? The subscription goes towards enabling features which have an ongoing cost (sync of files and listening state across devices so you can listen on desktop where you left off on mobile). I don't think they want to offer a one time fee for what is an indefinite period of cost.

AFAIK most features other than that are still fully supported in the free version of the app without ads though. So if you don't want any of those features, they're probably better supported by you recommending them to others than giving them a few dollars.

Yeah, I mostly just wanted to toss them a few bucks since they've created an app that I really love. That's a good point, though -- I've recommended Pocket Casts to a lot of folks at this point, and pushed several off of listening to podcasts on Spotify so I'm doing my part to contribute in small ways.

I use Podbean coupled with Pocket Casts. They do everything I need. These apps are really useful.

Also, there are only so many things that you expect from a Podcast app-

- Does not have ads. (Some banner ads are okay) - Offers download in external storage - Has bookmarking capabilities - Offers all the titles I listen to - Saves data associated with an email address

There. Simple. Don't want anything more.

Overcast. It has a “smart speed” feature that cuts out breaks and pauses in a way that’s almost unnoticeable but will save/gain you hundreds of hours. And audio clip sharing and great leveling in addition to privacy features.

https://overcast.fm/

There’s numerous small developers out there putting in much more care than Spotify.

Also a huge fan of Overcast. I just looked and it's saved me an extra "211 hours beyond speed adjustments alone".

Spotify still doesn't allow the user to add an RSS feed in the app, right? Until they support that it makes no sense to use as my main podcast app because the (admittedly few) podcasts I listen to are mostly either too behind the times to be on Spotify or I pay for their Patreon and need to be able to use the subscriber feed. I use AntennaPod on Android and the built-in Podcasts app on iOS.

Castro on iOS. It uses an inbox triage model that lets me subscribe to a lot of podcasts and keep up with what they’re doing, without cluttering my queue or inducing decision fatigue. It has more granular (per-podcast) controls for smart speed, silence skipping, voice leveling, skipping intros and automatic triage than Spotify. It also lets me upload custom audio and subscribe to custom/private feeds. Support for scripting listening and feed management with iOS shortcuts is above a useful threshold.

Prior to Castro, I used Overcast and Pocket Casts, which have similar features.

I’m sure Spotify is the future but these third party clients are great for heavy listeners who want more control.

I've been using iCatcher on ios for years now. It has all the things you mention but also a nice set of sorting logic to choose from as well as other per-podcast options like prioritization and number of episodes to download/display etc.

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