Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

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I've recently gotten into podcasts, using Stitcher as my app of choice (which is ok, but not great -- any suggestions for Android alternatives?)

Other have already nailed the main points driving adoption: simplified workflow and the desire to fill dead time (driving is mentioned in the article; for me it is cleaning the house.)

I don't think enough is made of the fantastic marketing channel that podcasting is. If you put out a high quality podcast you can get into the ear of your target market every week, and they are even going to seek you out. It's really hard to match this with another channel, IMHO. Blog posts are of course super competitive. There is just a deluge of content and playing the sharing game is hard work, and visitors bounce. Email newsletters perform well but there is no doubt that processing email is a chore for most. Video requires too much active engagement, and is too expensive to produce. Podcasts aren't so popular yet that the market is crowded, listeners hang around for a long time, and they seek out podcasts for fill time in their day, rather than your content having to compete with other tasks that demand more active attention.

I'm curious to hear what you specifically like about Stitcher. I have tried, and own, almost all of the major podcast apps and it was my least favorite experience so far. Their whole business model seems to be to scrape other people's content, download it, compress it, serve it up from their own servers and slap additional ads on it.

Some things that turned me off of Stitcher:

* Includes it's own advertisements on top of the ads already in the podcasts themselves.

* Increasingly difficult to skip past the Stitcher ads and if you want to remove ads you have to pay a monthly fee.

* Can't browse the episodes of a podcast without actively listening to a podcast?

The UI just wasn't that intuitive for me. Part of the problem might have been that I was looking for a "podcast app" and this was more a "radio app" built out of my podcasts. Using something like PocketCasts or OverCast has been a much better experience to me:

* No additional ads.

* No extra monthly fees.

* Easier browsing/control of your podcast episodes.

What am I missing about Stitcher? I could see it being useful for podcast discovery, or for when someone is new to podcasts. I just struggle to understand it's insane popularity over other podcast apps.

I have no love for Stitcher. Back when I did the iTunes / sync dance a few podcasts I listened to mentioned it, so I tried it out. It's what got me back into podcasts, by making the process so much more convenient, but I don't really like how it works.

PocketCasts is far and away my favorite podcast app. You should check it out. They have both an Android, iOS and web client.

I'll also recommend PocketCasts on Android - it lets you do some nice things with custom playlists, etc. and there are a few features that you may not find immediately so play around. If you have multiple devices (e.g. phone and tablet) it syncs listened and position data between the devices, though it doesn't show on them which items have been downloaded on a different device.

When you're looking at the list of podcasts, you can long-hold to select (after selecting the first, taps select additional ones). Then you can tap the + icon at the top to add the selected podcasts to your "up next" list.

To manage the Up Next queue, start a podcast playing and get to the view for that episode (it'll be taking the full screen, not the popup of show notes). The icon at the top right that looks like a bulleted list is the one for managing the Up Next queue.

Finally, there isn't a good way to mark a podcast as "unheard" rather than partially played - the workaround is to open the show notes popup by tapping the episode, then tap the icon for marking as heard, then tap it again to mark as unheard.

I can highly recommend Pocket Casts for Android.

I really enjoy BeyondPod, but sometimes I find it too complex for driving in the car, when it wants to create a new playlist or something. I have been looking at AntennaPod for that reason, its open source too!

I'd strongly recommend Pocket Casts. One extremely nice feature is that if you have multiple devices (including iOS ones) it will remember where you're up to in each show across devices.

The other killer is that they manage the episode refresh check through their servers so it's a single operation for your device to check for new stuff, instead of it having to go out and check (in my case >50) individual sites like other apps.

Sadly, you cannot copy the MP3s off an iDevice using Pocket Casts. I wanted to build an archive of a couple podcasts, and lost months of episodes when I wanted to replace my iPad.

This is probably to late for your use, but there is a neat Mac utility called iExplorer that lets you browse your iDevice's filesystem and copy files off of it. I'm pretty sure you could have grabbed the files using a trial of iExplorer.

Indeed, I have already flattened that device. however, I will re-install pocketcasts to see if I can extract stuff.

Just to provide some diversity (I've never heard of Pocket Casts before), I use Podcast Addict on Android and I love it.

Auto-download + auto-add to playlist for certain podcasts makes it really easy to fire up the playlist without having to think about anything - I use the playlist widget so I jump right into the relevant screen.

It allows Android intents to trigger the downloads, so you can use Tasker/Llama to check for new episodes every time you connect to your car, or every time you get to a Wi-Fi network and start charging, or whatever.

It also has customizable skip buttons, so you can skip forward 15 seconds and back 10 even from the lock screen, for example, depending on your preferences.

It also has streaming and a multitude of other features, but the above are the ones that made me stick with it and stop looking for alternatives.

Also, it's free. 4.5 on the Play store https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...

Pocket Casts is what I use. I love it.

You'll find a lot of love for Pocket Casts for good reason. The interface is slick, things are pretty well laid out, and the instant check for new episodes is awesome. It used to be the app used, and would be the one I still use if they didn't change how they now manage the queued up 'current' playlist. You used to be able to see all unread shows, click on one and it would play that unread queue starting at that show. Now you have to manage that manually. It also has some difficulty handling certain special situations (auto delete listened to podcasts except from this series where it should never delete. The wording on the screens makes you think you can do this but you can't.)

I've tried about a dozen apps and currently use the mostly inferior, but very flexible Doggcatcher because when you listen to as many podcasts as I do, at 2.5x speed, the manual queue management is unfortunate.

BeyondPod is an excellent podcast client for Android.

I use antennaepod, but I think it's far from perfect.

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