Nerdful Things – Pocket Casts

I mentioned on my Clazio review that I use ‘Pocket Casts‘ – I’m a bit of a newcomer to the app as I used to use ‘We Cast‘ and before that I would stream them through ‘Plex‘ as my podcasts were all done through iTunes.  I used to have a 160GB iPod which I carried with me everywhere.  After almost ten years, it died on me so I moved to ‘Plex’ as I could stream that via my laptop, tablet and phone.

‘We Cast’ was good but when I discovered ‘Pocket Casts’ I knew it was the app I both needed and deserved.  Effortlessly syncing across devices and a web player for my laptop.  In the words of John Thomson on ‘The Fast Show‘: NICE.

I started off using the app on my phone only.  Headphones in or hooked up to my portable speakers.  I was looking forward to my ‘Clazio’ to free up my phone and dedicate a device to my podcasts.  I then decided to try out the web player.  They give you a 14 day free trial and after that you pay a one-off fee.  I would have bought into it but a glaring problem presented itself – I set up a filter on the app to collate all my unlistened episodes and play them in order of oldest-newest.  The web player doesn’t facilitate this.  Bit of a pain but not a deal breaker.

Fast forward to the arrival of ‘Clazio’.  I set the app up and immediately notice that not all my episodes are syncing.  My subscribed podcasts are fine but it was missing over 100 episodes.  As you can see from my featured image, I have a ton of podcasts to listen to – I used to have less than 100 but then I fell behind and added some new shows to my list.  So I eventually sort that out by manually downloading the episodes my ‘Clazio’ wasn’t seeing by cross-referencing them with the unplayed episodes on my phone.

I decide to Google the issues I faced and it seems that these are common issues with the app (in its various flavours) and a number of folks on Reddit have all but given up.  Some of the posts I found where the developers responded to say fixes were coming were from over a year ago.  To be fair, it’s only two guys that work on it (as far as I could make out) and they no doubt have full-time jobs and other commitments but it seems that, yet again, bold statements turn into ultimate let-downs.  At least the app didn’t cost me over £100 mind…

Gripes aside, this app is brilliant.  The few issues I have had are overshadowed by the sheer simplicity and fairly easy workarounds.  I love podcasts and have done for years – starting off with ‘SModcast‘ and then branching out to other shows on the ‘SModcast‘ podcast network and then stumbling upon ‘The Nerdist‘, ‘The Kevin & Bean Show‘ and my latest favourite, ‘Radio Labyrinth‘ – thanks to my Facebook buddy Jeff (who just so happens to be one of the co-hosts on the show).

Fix the issues that I’ve come across and this app is the app to end all podcast apps.  If you love podcasts and you haven’t tried this, give it a go.  The one down-side is the app isn’t free.  At all.  But I used my Google Opinion Rewards so technically I didn’t spend a penny.