I’m currently looking for a replacement to castbox. Castbox us OK, but I want to learn what else good is out there. Bonus points for one that has movement-sensitive sleep timer the way Smart AudioBook Player has.
UPDATE: Testing out Antennapod. Looks nice, and seems to do what I want it to do. I need to experiment with the auto-download a bit and see if it behaves the way I want it to. If it does, we have a winner.
I migrated from Doggcatcher to Podcast Addict a couple years ago. They’re both OK. Most podcast apps are unnecessarily complex, convoluted and cumbersome to me, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Lately I’ve been testing Media Monkey - it’s primarily an iTunes-like app for Android. It indexes your own media store, and can sync whatever you choose to your phone. It also has a podcast tool in the desktop app.
Downside is the podcast portion doesn’t seem to have discovery/search like you’d think with a podcast app - you have to manually add the RSS url yourself. Plus to get wifi sync (which is critical to me), you have to buy both the desktop ($35) and Android app ($5). I get it, development isn’t free, and wifi sync really works. I don’t buy many apps, but I paid for both parts of Media Monkey, because I haven’t found anything else that provides media management, playlist, and sync.
I moved over to Podcast Addict from BeyondPod. I’m pretty happy here.
Apologies for the double reply, but I found out something else about MediaMonkey last night. I thought my podcasts were badly organised because I’d made a mistake in the download options on MediaMonkey for Windows, and tried to fix it.
It turns out that the Android app automatically sorts podcasts by the album artist rather than the podcast name, but a lot of podcasts have the episode presenters listed as the album artists. As a result, I’ve currently got 10 differents podcasts named Clockwise, and 9 named Brad and Will Make a Tech Pod on my phone. If I want to listen to multiple episodes in order, I’ve got to search for them between what MediaMonkey considers to be separate podcasts.
There have been posts on the forum from 2019 and 2022 asking if there’s a way to change this, but they’ve been ignored :(
Keep an eye on your media volume with Media Monkey. I’ve been using the Windows and Android versions for years, but I’ve noticed that a lot of my music is getting quieter.
I haven’t been able to narrow it down to Media Monkey or something else yet, but MM is the most likely culprit, as it’s the only media player I use.
I’ve ripped CDs with the same settings as other CDs, and the files play back much quieter than the other ripped CDs and the CD they were ripped from.