Podcast App & Player for Pc

I love listening to podcasts and I am constantly trying to find a player that works for me. I like Castbox because if it’s simplicity and for the most part it does what I want and helps me control how I want to listen to podcasts. However there is one thing I wish it would do, I wish it would give me the option to download not the new seat episodes, but the oldest episodes. One thing I really do not like is going through a manually choosing the episodes I want to download. I don’t want to automatically download the most recent. I had a player that I love, it was the RSS Radio player. The option of choosing which episodes to automatically download and it would automatically build my playlist for me in the way I wanted it. I had to get rid of it because since the last update it did no work very well. It was extremely slow or unresponsive, the app kept shutting down, and it would get rid if my podcasts so I had to find them again. If Castbox would give me the option of choosing which ones to automatically download and build my playlist for me, I would consider this perfect. I have chosen to upgrade for now, but I will keep looking for the player that allows me control of how to download and listen. Also, this keeps crashing whenever I’m trying to work on my lists. Thanks for this app overall. You have a great selection and I love that you have old episodes of some of my favorite podcasts.

So much to like about this app but there are several key issues which need to be addressed especially for a premium app. The biggest and most important is that the app has trouble picking up new episodes and showing them in the new releases section. Maybe it’s because I have a lot of subscriptions but I went through my shows individually and found seven new episodes that the app had not surfaced. Of all the features a the app app must get right, this is number one. Until this is fixed, I can’t recommend people trust the app. Secondly, if you share the link to an episode and the person opens it on a computer, they get a nice web interface to listen in. This is a great way to share and to get people curious about the app. Unfortunately, they’ve taken the opposite tactic on mobile. If some one open the link on their phone it forces then to download the app. This is just bad user experience. I can promise that no one ends up downloading the app from a tactic like this. This just click out of the link and never listen to the episode. And as almost 100% of what we share is opened on a phone not a desktop, this makes the user stop sharing. I have. Make the web app available on mobile browsers. More people will share and hence more people will know about castbox.

Not sure when it started (less than a month ago), the app started to never continue playing episodes in my downloads. The app use to just continue on playing things in order in my downloads. Now it plays an episode, then stops or the sound freezes at the beginning of the next episode. Then if you press pause then play again, it starts playing the latest episode from the the app, not the downloads. I can no longer just listen for hours on end, one the app after another. I have to babysit the app between episodes and it’s super annoying. Another thing (this might have just been fixed the other day), when I finish in episode, the next episode would start playing at normal speed even though it said it was set to the 1.3 speed. I would have to toggle the speed to get it to continue playing at the correct 1.3 speed. I wish I could choose the order of the downloads to play in as well.

Really wanted to like this app. Mostly because some podcasts I listen to are partnered with Castbox, so it would benefit them to listen through Castbox instead of Apple Podcasts. Anyway, here is why I am going back to Apple the app and deleting Castbox: 1.) If you’re in the car and listening to a the app on Castbox, the the app will not pause during the Maps instructions. So you can count on every 1-3 mins missing about 5 words of what your the app is saying if you’re not on the highway. I looked through the settings and couldn’t find a way to pause the the app during Map instructions. 2.) First two pages are “discover pages”. I like the “Subscribed” but it would be nice if the “Listen” page showed your recently updated podcasts. Also, “Subscribed” is not in order from most recent uploads, so it’s easy to miss a new the app if you don’t scroll down and look for the tiny orange “1”. Also, if you want to change the discover page or anything you have to pay. Overall, good app but is not a replacement for Apple podcasts. You don’t have to pay for Apple Podcasts, and you don’t have to discover new podcasts unless you want to. In app purchases is a no-go considering podcasts are free