Looking to replace iTunes as your podcast app? Downcast is really cool. It has both an iPhone iOS app and a MacOS desktop app.
Four reasons to use Downcast as your podcast app:
- Create your own custom playlists
- Mobile and desktop syncing
- Different settings for each device
- Automatically skip ahead, custom setting for every podcast
1. Create your own custom playlists
You can create your own playlists and add certain podcasts to them. I have playlists for topics like: art, baseball, news, and religion. You can can make your own topic-based playlists and add your favorite podcasts.
The playlists in mobile
Mobile playlists Mobile podcasts
Playlists in desktop
2. Mobile and desktop syncing
With Downcast, both your laptop and iPhone app can sync with each other. If you subscribe to a new podcast to one device, it will update your other device! Very handy.
Desktop syncing options Mobile syncing options
3. Different settings for each device
Plus, you can have different settings for each device. For example, I keep the three most recent episodes on my laptop. But on my iPhone, that would take up way too much precious storage. So on my iPhone the settings are to keep just one recent episode.
Desktop episodes to keep Mobile episodes to keep
4. Automatically skip ahead, custom setting for every podcast
Some podcasts always have ads at the beginning. Yuck. Yeah, you can manually hit that “skip 30 seconds” button. But wouldn’t it be cool if you can just automatically skip over the beginning for specific podcasts? With Downcast, you can! Create a setting for each podcast to skip ahead a certain amount of time. You pick the podcast. You pick the exact number of seconds to skip.
For Wall Street Journal’s Minute Briefing, they always have a 30-second ad at the beginning. Here’s a screenshot of my setting to skip the first thirty seconds.
AWESOME.
How do you listen to podcasts?
Do you use any apps? Websites?
What timing! Just 30 minutes after I post this, Neiman Lab’s daily newsletter comes out with this article, https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/podcasters-now-have-three-plots-of-land-to-prospect-for-gold-where-they-used-to-have-just-one/
A clip:
“here’s a future I’ve been mulling over: one in which Apple is no longer the overwhelming end-all of podcast distribution, and where podcast listening is broadly spread across Apple, Spotify, a rainbow of podcast apps, and maybe Pandora.”
The one thing I don’t like about this app is that it has no support for last.fm scrobbling.
Does Downcast have an API to access what you’ve listened to?
Good question! I thought the same thing before I made the comment about Downcast not being able to scrobble, but a Google search for site:http://www.downcastapp.com api doesn’t give any results about Downcast having an API–only about Downcast using iTunes’ API.