Antenna Pod is 10/10.
Been using AntennaPod for 2 years now. Amazing app.
I did the switch some times ago and I love AntennaPod. Still, I did not manage to have synchronization with a desktop service, and I miss that from Google Podcast.
Exactly, a podcast app must be available in all your devices, I tried it and couldn’t stick with it because of the same issue.
Also it is the same issue I have with Pocketcasts because I don’t pay a premium account and only sometimes I want to listen on the desktop.
This is my main concern too.
Also AntennaPod seems to be worse than Google Podcast at Bluetooth connections going into standby during conversational pauses creating jilted cutoffs.
I have not experienced that, but have you tried the Skip silence in audio feature? It does a good job removing pauses in audio which would hopefully solve the problem you are experiencing.
I’m typically looking to entertain myself with a podcast and skipping silence would be like cutting parts of scenes in a movie because “nothing is happening”.
It’s probably more of an issue with the cheap Bluetooth devices I’ve tried to use.
Sorry I still don’t see the issue.
Aren’t those skip silence trimmers just a few seconds of nothing?
I have always had them on with Pocket Casts and honestly I wouldn’t know better 😅
Some people don’t mind watching syndicated reruns of TV sitcoms that have been sped up to provide more time for commercial breaks. I find that it ruins the experience for me. Conversations have natural pauses and cutting them out in a podcast similarly ruins the experience for me. Google podcasts has this feature and I intentionally don’t use the feature.
I’ve been using Samsung Dex or Windows 11’s Phone Link to open the app on my desktop.
Scrcpy now has audio forwarding too.
it’s a good workaround, but not a complete solution
Gpodder2go has your back.
Have always been curious about AntennaPod. Was about to switch from PocketCasts earlier this year but turns out PocketCasts became open source a little over a year ago, October 2022.
https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-apps-are-now-open-source/
Still curious about AntennaPod but PocketCasts has been and continues to work super well and has a web/desktop (PWA) client so may just stick with it. Mobile app repos below btw.
https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-ios
PocketCasts seems a bit more expensive than I’d like.
I think it’s usable for free though I’m not sure to what degree since I picked up a one time payment lifetime plus subscription some years ago. I see it’s sadly now only free or monthly subscription. 😔
guess I missed the boat on that one.
So people are actually using Google Podcasts? It’s a pretty shit app for the use case.
How so? It has fit my use case better than any other podcast app in the last 15 years.
It’s so basic, which is precisely why I like it.
Ok, I just revisited it after a few years, and it seems kinda decent now, altho it’s still pretty ugly. Back when I first tried it when it launched, it was as barebones as it could be. Adding new podcasts sucked, it had no trim silence option, no web app etc. Still tho, Pocket Casts is ahead of it even today.
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not for long since it’s being shut down in 2024 :P
I never understand why people choose formats meant for local consumption and then use centralized cloud services to consume it. Podcasts aren’t the only example. RSS feed readers and git are others. If you want synchronization across devices, then use either a plain cloud storage or something even better - like syncthing.
Syncthing? How can I use syncthing to mimic the behavior of google podcasts?
I use AntennaPod as it’s the best Foss option but it’s very buggy.
I never had a single bug, please report bugs?
That’s my experience too. Never seen a single bug or crash.
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For me it just never shows the correct play time so podcasts will get to the end in app but still have like 10 minutes left to play. Also it has a habit of randomly skipping back 10 seconds every now and then.
Never had this issue with lots of sources
I liked it but until an annoying bug drove me to Podverse which is also pretty good.
I don’t see any, apart from the fact that AntennaPod’s persistent notification for media playback doesn’t respond if you leave it for too long. Have you tried Escapepod btw?
Google Podcasts was great. AntennaPod is horrific. It won’t auto download new episodes no matter how many redundant settings I try to switch back and forth. Every other app I just hit the auto-download toggle and it works flawlessly. There’s also no way to “expire” old episodes so anything you don’t listen to is just stored forever.
Also sometimes it just literally does nothing. Push the play button and nothing at all happens.
Auto-downloads work wonderfully here and can even be set per-podcast which is such a nice feature.
Not saying this to denigrate your experience but to perhaps soften the ‘is horrific’ notion into somewhat more of a ‘does not work for you’ one. Otherwise, I suppose Pocket Casts is also open source nowadays - or has always been and I did not notice? But that was a reasonably good alternative for me as well before I switched to AntennaPod.
I’ve tested this on 4 or 5 different devices and each of them had major problems.
Several people have argued with me before that it works “fine” only to later admit that they don’t even use it.
By all means, if you have the time to pfaff with it, give it a shot. Personally I listen to podcasts when driving and can’t be diving through the 394718024 different settings to figure out how to just make it work while driving down the road.
I use it daily and it’s great. It has really granular controls and I only download some podcasts and even those I can cancel the auto download if it has a word reference I don’t want. My only complaint is the syncing between devices which admittedly is not great.
That is a little of how I use it too - I have all podcasts set to download automatically globally (set it up to 25 episodes at the same time) and put them in my queue so I always have exactly 25 episodes to listen to in any order there each day.
Then there are 2 daily podcasts that I do not let automatically download (but automatically refresh, and I love that the app delineates between the two), however one regularly produces longer episodes including a lot of the shorter ones that I do let it automatically download. Huh, I never realized how advanced the setup actually is. Though I do remember the actual ‘setting up’ being relatively painless after getting to grips with the global/per-podcast difference.
Also, fwiw I have the synchronization set up using one of the self-hosted options instead of the default gpodder service - which is often down intermittently - and it works well enough, even if a bit slow every now and again.
I have similar issues. Guess it’s because I listen to vary long podcasts that I often don’t finish, because there’s a newer episode already. Because of that old episodes will be considered unfinished and block new ones from getting downloaded. Maybe if there download limit is set to e.g. 20 Antenna Pod should delete the oldest episode of the 20 downloaded and download the newest one when it gets released
Or maybe it should just delete episodes that haven’t been played in a given time
Also sometimes it just literally does nothing. Push the play button and nothing at all happens.
That’s a bug with the notification/lockscreen widget AFAICT. Pressing play on the main player window should work. This is the most serious bug I’ve found. It’s quite a promising player otherwise.
I’m happy to know that Pocketcasts is OS now, that was my player of choice before trying to jump to Antennapod.
Yeah, that bug is super unfortunate, it has been working flawlessly for me for years, this has only been an issue since the last update or two.
That’s a bug with the notification/lockscreen widget
That’s not what I was referring to. I mean the play button in the app.
That’s weird then. Never happened to me and I’ve used it everyday for a couple of weeks now. I wonder if the two bugs are related.
Unfortunately, that will be a better experience than Google Podcasts in 2024. Always looking for better options. Let me know if you know of any.
I don’t. Unfortunately I have simply just stopped listening to podcasts. Just like I’ve stopped watching TV. Because the only options are 1. A proprietary system used to exploit consumers (because consumers don’t give a fuck) and 2. A FOSS system that respects it’s users’ but isn’t actually functional.
Please excuse my rant.
I’ve never had an issue with this. And no, I don’t know how to help you. Contacting the devs would be your best hope.
I’m not on the support team.
Antennapod is good enough and has a widget, but to be honest, it needs to be a lot better.
They need to implement podcast discovery. Just showing 20 separate podcasts with nothing else is clearly not enough.
Lack of discovery is the least of my issues with AntennaPod, but that would be nice too.
This has been a great alternative for me so far. Very straightforward and functional.
I’m also looking into podverse
Visit takeout.google.com and select Google Podcasts to export your Google Podcasts data in OPML format.
I wonder when that became a thing. I migrated at the beginning of the year and had to manually add all subscriptions because Google Podcasts had no way of exporting anything.
I guess someone made a GDPR complaint.
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That’s the advantage of solutions like antenna pod. There just isn’t any platform that could be shut down
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Some other commenters have mentioned Podverse as an alternative.
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I use podverse. Technically, you could use google podcasts like a search engine and just subscribe directly to the podcast’s rss feed.
I’ve been trying out podverse since another commenter mentioned it. I didn’t know about it before.
works fine
