Or any time-based media. I wonder as AI tools now start to scan such forms, providing summaries with timestamps, whether our apps will shift again.
I do enjoy the serendipity of stumbling upon ideas and writers I hadn’t known from podcasts warbling away as I prep meals or drive. My attention can be divided usefully at times but I’ve also had to relearn letting podcasts wash over me and let them go, much as old radio did. Just because we can control playback doesn’t always mean we should.
Not sure what you mean by skim, but you can play them at whatever speed you like and you can skip forward and back. And you certainly don’t have to be in a mode that starts playing other content that you didn’t request.
Podcasts would appear to be ideal candidates for the “dismissability” criterion.
How about your iPhone backup?
Or, can you log into a web browser with your overcast ID?
I get all your points.
My conclusion is different. They’re one tool in the toolbox, not inferior. Good luck reading an article while you’re driving. Or working. Or doing the dishes.
Written articles often start with lots of background never getting to the point. Not the same level of chit chat BS on podcasts but still. And I have magic buttons to skip past that content.
In web pages it’s a constant fight to block ads. Again easy with podcasts.
I do like to copy paste quotes so the transcription feature may solve that problem.
On the other hand, sometimes I can get Safari to read me web articles. But it’s not a great workflow. I haven’t figured out how to queue up a playlist of reading my favorite articles, something inherent with podcast subscriptions.
My forecast is that over time the two will converge as they are already doing.
Thanks, but the sync database must have gotten corrupted because Overcast has the same missing data on all devices.
I never heard back from Marco, the developer, disappointing to say the least.
Sorry to say it, but after the major data loss and the complete lack of support (as I’ve experienced in the past) I don’t see how I can trust Overcast again.
Back to Apple Podcasts for now and considering other options.
In poll results, Adam cites this as a strong reason for using Overcast. I used Overcast for years with this feature, and I didn’t see the value. I don’t recall any podcasts that had moments of silence that were worth speeding past. Maybe there are some out there, but I don’t think I can remember a single one. It sounds cool. But has anyone actually observed a noticeable difference?
Changing the overall speed I find to be much more useful, because they’re pretty much always talking, and some talk a lot slower than I need to follow along.
“Smart Speed has saved you an extra 483 hours beyond speed adjustments alone.”
Too bad there is no “you have listened to Overcast xxxx hours.”
Yea so this comes back to the question of what is this audio material with all this empty space? I do see that mine claims some saved hours.
Anyway, I don’t have the feature now, never noticed it doing anything, and don’t miss it. And now we have granular enough control over speed to make it usable, which I think saves me a lot more time than speed boost.
But not being able to share episodes easily is a much bigger ticket item for me, along with the other features I noted 
Pocket Casts also offers Speed Comtrols and Trim Silence, globally as well as podcast specific.
I am surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned the most annoying of all Apple podcast bugs: the inability to (manually) delete podcasts. This popped up years ago and apparently never got fixed. My mom still has the bug on her iPhone but she doesn’t care. It was the reason why I switched to Overcast.
For all its failings, I still listen to podcasts using wireless headphones as I putter around the house using the tried and true iTunes. It runs on an old Mac mini connected to a tv running Sierra, and its only purpose is to play podcasts and music. I’ve found iTunes has the cleanest appearance and is easiest to choose the podcast I want to hear on the fly. That said, I’ll take a second look at these apps and see if I like them better.
Yes. Every day.
Another thing I liked about iTunes versus the newer Apple Podcasts app on the Mac is that iTunes uses human-readable filenames in an accessible place vs obscure filenames in a hidden location.
iTunes stores Podcasts in a subfolder of the iTunes folder, alongside your music library, and it retains the original name of the podcast series and episodes. For example, if there were a podcast series called “Totally Awesome TidBITS Podcast Series” and it had an episode called “Do You Use It? Podcast Apps,” you could find the file in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts/Totally Awesome TidBITS Podcast Series/Do You Use It? Podcast Apps.mp3
In contrast, Apple Podcasts stores podcast files in a subfolder of the hidden ~/Library/Group Containers/243LU875E5.groups.com.apple.podcasts/Library/ folder, and the filenames are character strings that have no relation to the name of the podcast series/episode.
The iTunes approach makes it easy to find a podcast file and move/copy it for other purposes, while the Podcasts approach shouts, “Keep out!”
I have my own beef with Spotify. My podcast suddenly disappeared from it. When I asked my provider (Libsyn) why this might be, they investigated and said it was because I only had a few minutes of speech (it’s a blues podcast) and Spotify insists on a bigger speech-to-music ratio. Is that because a music podcast is seen as a competitor? Seems that way …
Yes, but you shouldn’t have to care.
Apple’s various media-based apps (iTunes, Music, Photos, Books) all have their own various schemas for storing documents, but with all of them, you can drag/drop an item from the app to the Finder if you want to copy it somewhere else.
(Photos requires you to do an export from the menu-bar if you want to make a copy that preserves all the metadata, but that seems like an exception here.)
It’s been a long time since I ran Podcasts, but I would like to think the same will work there.
I would argue that digging down into an app’s library database to find the file, no matter how well it may be organized is too much work. Just drag the file from the app to someplace else to make your copy and don’t bother with finding the actual file location.
Different strokes for different folks.
I will concede that abstracting direct file manipulation is more robust programmatically, as it minimizes the chances that a user will perform an action that leads to disagreement between a file’s name/location and the app’s associated metadata database.
At the same time, it puts a layer of abstraction between arguably the most elementary skill in graphical computing (navigating around clearly named files and folders) and the end user. We may see dragging and dropping from an app to the Finder as an elementary skill, but is it really something that will occur to many end users? To be fair, I am aware of UX research that suggests even basic navigation through a file hierarchy is beyond the skills of many users.
I also will concede that my thinking on human-computer interaction is heavily influenced by what was the norm in the 80s and 90s. Sure, add more advanced and efficient means of interacting with data, but retain the most basic, discoverable methods of interaction to engage the novice user. Occasionally, they’ll stub their toes, but that’s part of learning. My views on discoverability no doubt are considered archaic by the “modern” design community.
So you’re saying that every day you can observe a difference between playing with Smart Speed vs. without? Can you describe what you observe? Do you hear the difference or you just see the number tracking the amount of time saved going up in the app?
It certainly appears that it can help some people:
Listening to the demo in that experiment, it confirms my hunch that the best value for this feature is for shows that experience a lot of what musicians call rubato: some passages are so fast that doing an overall speed increase would make them too fast, while other passages are too slow or even have pauses. So the speaker leaves you with little discretion over how to usefully manage playback speed. That’s a good use case for Smart Speed.
I don’t think I listen to anything of this sort. But it’s a clever feature.
I miss PodCruncher. Such an easy interface to use.
I know that you weren’t asking me, but for me I always have smart speed on, never have it off, and wouldn’t dream of listening to the same podcast episode twice just to try see if I can tell the difference - so I just trust that Overcast is doing it right.
I do recall that in earlier versions Overcast would do weird things to the intro tune of the Slate Political Gabfest podcast (the tune has since been changed), but there was a time when that weirdness stopped happening and the tune sounded normal. (I never noticed it with the music in any other podcast.) I didn’t really care, because if I am thinking fast enough I skip past the intro anyway, but I am guessing that Marco Arment discovered how to distinguish between voice and music and turned off the feature whenever music was present.
The problem is that the line-items (Photo, podcast, song, book) may not exist on your computer at all. The app may have deleted the file, expecting to later be able to re-download it from iCloud or one of Apple’s store sites.
Note also that (for another example), iTunes (and Music) may not be storing the song file in one of those well-structured directory trees in your Music library. Depending on configuration, a drag/drop action to add music to your library may leave the file in-place, without copying it to the library. Or your library may have been created with a different version of the app that organizes files differently. Unless/until you perform a consolidate operation on your library, there won’t be any obvious structure to those files, either.
But the app knows where the files are, because it can play/view them. A drag/drop from the interface will do the right thing and not make you do the hard work of determining where the files may be stored.
I would also say that knowledge of and reliance on specific locations in a hierarchical file system is far from “the most elementary skill”. The whole concept requires training. You and I don’t think about it because we’ve been using computers since the time when there was no other way to access content.
But people learning today are far more used to relying on search systems and specialized apps. They may not know the specific location where any documents are stored. And with cloud-based storage, the very concept may be pretty ambiguous.
I have no clue where anything is stored on my iPhone, and it’s actually pretty difficult to find out. But it doesn’t matter. I ultimately don’t care what the file system or network path to a photo is. If the Photos app gives me the means to quickly locate it, and then send/share it with others, I don’t have to care.
