What do you use to listen to podcasts?

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What do you use to listen to podcasts? I find iTunes and Spotify to lack certain features and have yet to find a good platform for podcasts.

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I use Pocket Casts. It is multi-platform and it covers all I need.
https://www.pocketcasts.com

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I generally prefer to download the audio file so I can pause/skip etc :smiley:

What kind of features Ohm?

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As an users of Pocket Casts I can not live without:

  • Skip intros customised per podcasts. Some podcast have from 1 min to 5-6 minutes of advertising . You can easily forget about that. When you listen a lot of podcasts, all of that time adds up very quickly.
  • Variable speed/trim silence customised per podcast. Some podcasters speak faster. Some topics are more complex and details must be listen more carefully to fully get the most of the episodes.
  • History of listened episodes.
  • Sync between platforms. I can start to listen to an episode in the Macbook and finish it on the go in my phone.

Some stats from Pocket Casts:

Screenshot_20200615-195834_Pocket Casts
Screenshot_20200615-195834_Pocket Casts1440Ă—3040 377 KB

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Last I tried to listen to podcasts in Spotify, there wasn’t a way to “mark as watched”. The same goes for listening to audiobooks with Spotify. If I had already read chapter 1, there’s no way to tell Spotify. The lack of such a basic features really turns me off from using the product at all.

iTunes / Apple Podcasts keeps wanting to sort descending by date, such that the newest is on top. That seems really odd to me. I would like my audiobook and podcasts in chronological order with the oldest (first) at the top and the newest (last) on the bottom.

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I’ve been using player.fm for roughly a year now.
Their mobile application is absolutely top-notch and is a great improvement on what I did previously (trying some other apps as well as manually downloading the files):

  • it keeps up-to-date with your subscriptions and lists them both per-series and globally.
  • but it downloads the podcasts you want so you can listen to them without WiFi-access (and without data usage) and freely skip forward/backward (@AstonJ).
  • Of course you can still stream episodes that you do not currently have locally, if you want to.
  • It has many features to improve playback including per-series settings to e.g. play on higher or lower speeds, boost the volume or reduce extra noise, etc.
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As I normally listen on my phone, I use Overcast (iOS only). The ability to intelligently adjust playback speed without distortion is the winning feature for me.

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