Saturday 25 January 2014

Podcast Listening for a slider iOS and Android - Pocket Cast

The thing that I do most with my Samsung Galaxy S3 is to use it for listing to podcasts. The Android application that I use for that is called Pocket Casts and generally I don't have a complaint about how well it works. I can have settings in there which are specific to one podcast and different from the rest of the podcasts. Sometimes it is handy for a podcast that I keep the last three episodes of the podcast so that I can go back to listen to them again if I want. With other podcasts, generally once I have listened to the podcast it can be deleted and that would be my default setting. So there are granular settings within the application that allow me to go in and change settings just for a single podcast. I see that there is a version of this for iOS too. Good if you want to sync between them and keep the playlists and podcasts the same on two or more devices.

Video and Audio Podcast Consumption

I can download video podcasts as well as audio podcasts and I can make a various playlists to suit what I want to listen to. Maybe I would like to have all of my comedy podcasts all in one playlist and then I can go to the playlist and listen to all the comedy one after the other. I could do the same for the tech and science podcasts and maybe another list of drama downloads. Often what I like to do is just to go to the downloaded playlist which is a default playlist that comes with the application and have it sorted so that the latest podcast is at the top. Once I start the podcast playing then it will go onto the next one when that has finished and so on. I know it makes it a little bit like radio where you're not necessarily choosing directly what you are listening to next, but I'm not too worried about that. It can be a good thing for me to have a laugh listening to a comedy podcast such as the Comedy of the Week from the BBC and then afterwards go into something like The Maccast so that I can get the latest news about Apple products.

Pocket Casts by Shifty Jelly 2

There is a button in the top toolbar of the application that allows me to mark all episodes as played and to delete files from storage. If I am in the playlist for one particular podcast then there is a chance that I might choose that, otherwise I leave that button alone. There is also a share button and I can choose to share to whatever other applications I have on the phone, that could be to Google+ or Facebook, or maybe I want to send it out as an email to let specific persons know what I was listening to. Plenty of options in Pocket Cast for the sharing of Podcasts.

Finding podcasts to listen to

BBC Friday Night Comedy 2

When you press on the plus icon at the top of the application you can go to the Discover section of Pocket Cast. In Featured it gives you suggestions and those seem to be based upon whichever podcasts are popular generally. It would be nice if these suggestions were based upon the podcasts that you have already subscribed to. At the moment I am getting featured suggestions for Planet Money, Iterate, Stuff You Should Know, and This American Life, none of these are particularly interesting to me. Slide across and you can see the Popular podcasts and then there we have the Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4, Android Central Podcast, Football Weekly And the Sceptic's Guide to the Universe which I have just subscribed to. Usually when you first subscribe to a new podcast it will download the latest episode so that you can quite soon be listening to, or watching that podcast.

Fiddling with the settings in Pocket Cast

It might well be that you want to have the podcast download it only when you are on Wi-Fi and you could further narrow that down by saying that you only want it to download when you are charging the phone. I have application set so that it will check for new episodes every hour, but you can choose from a list of doing that manually through to doing it daily at a specific time. The application gives you notifications if you want them, in the status bar of your phone and it can also let you know with the default sound and even with a vibrate.

Listening to podcasts on Android

There are a number of different applications that you can choose from and up till now I have tried to or three. I can't remember the name of the others because once I had found one that I liked, I have stuck with it. I do wonder sometimes about the Pocket Cast application because the phone has been doing unscheduled reboots and most often when I have been using this application. That could be down to the fact that I am very often to be found using this application more than anything else. So the problem could be the application or it could just be the fact that I'm using a custom CyanogenMod ROM on the phone which is having a problem from time to time and I notice it while using Pocket Casts.

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