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.
I use Pocket Casts. It is multi-platform and it covers all I need.
https://www.pocketcasts.com
I generally prefer to download the audio file so I can pause/skip etc
What kind of features Ohm?
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:
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.
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.
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.