If this keeps happening, I'm going to get frustrated with it pretty quickly, but we'll see what happens over time. And I think it was the same podcast file both times, so maybe there was just something wrong with that file. I'm not sure if the app crashed or if it just stopped playing. I was driving both times, so I didn't see what happened. In both cases, I could start the podcast back up where I left off, no problem. I've had it randomly stop playing a podcast twice so far, which is a bit puzzling. You can set it to download episodes only when on wifi, which is a good thing, as my Verizon data usage has been a problem lately. I use it only for audio podcasts, and I follow a few of those. It works fine for playing downloaded episodes, and it can also stream episodes that you haven't downloaded, which is nice.įor the iOS app, that also works reasonably well. Basically, it just plays the video and gets out of the way, which is what I want. (If there were any other video podcasts that I was interested in, I'd use it for those too, but there isn't anything else I'm following right now.) It does a good enough job on that. (I wish that was something I could take for granted with a commercial Mac app, but alas, no.) I'm using the Mac app mostly to watch Tekzilla. It seems to be a reasonably well-written Mac app, not taking up too much memory or CPU, and launching pretty quickly. In terms of the actual functionality of the apps, let's start with the Mac app. (And if I wanted the copied files to have reasonable names, I'd have to rename them too.) So I'm not too happy about that, but it's not a terribly big deal. So, to copy out all of the episodes of a given podcast, I'd really have to do "show in finder" on each one individually, and copy them one at a time. Instead, it puts all of its files together in a single folder, and names them with (I assume) random GUIDs. But, unlike iTunes, it doesn't organize individual podcasts into their own folders, now does it keep the original file names. Which brings up a separate point: Instacast does allow you to right-click on a given podcast episode and select "Show in Finder", so that's good. With Instacast, I can't really do that, and I guess I'd want to copy the files out of Instacast and into a separate folder. There are a few podcasts, like Warren Ellis' SPEKTRMODULE, for instance, that I'd like to just keep forever. I kind of wish, though, that you could set certain podcasts to keep forever. I've set it to use up to 10 GB on my Mac, and 1 GB on my iPhone, so that should be good enough. It's pretty sensible about picking what to delete - it goes for episodes that you've already played and haven't marked as favorites first, if I understand it correctly. Basically, you set a maximum amount of space that you'd like to use for podcasts, and Instacast deletes stuff once it reaches that limit. It's not quite perfect for the way I'd like to do it, but it's reasonable. Instacast has a pretty interesting way of dealing with podcast files, actually. After using both for about a week, I'm mostly satisfied, but there are definitely a few shortcomings.įirst, on the plus side, Instacast hasn't arbitrarily deleted a bunch of podcasts from my Mac, as iTunes did last week. After my issue with podcasts that I posted about last week, I decided to switch from using iTunes and the Apple podcast app to Instacast.
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