Overcast Podcast Player Gains Audio and Video Clip-Sharing Feature

After PocketCasts blew itself up with its disastrous version 7 “upgrade”, I settled on Castro podcast app and never looked back.

I paid for an annual subscription to both Overcast and Castro, but Castro won out on features and UX. Also, the Castro devs seem like nice people. The developer of Overcast seems like a... not so nice person.

The developer of Overcast seems like a... not so nice person.

What are you basing that judgement on? I've listened to Marco on podcasts since he was doing Build & Analyze in 2011 and I think he's a good guy. He can be strong-headed and opinionated, but I've noticed that over the years he seems to be doing better and better about recognizing that he doesn't always have all the answers.

He also seems to genuinely care about the medium of podcasts and the podcasting community, and he has put his money where his mouth is many times in regards to that.

My Twitter feed has been filled with these clips. Great success for overcast app.

All I want is an option to automatically delete all of my podcasts with a minute or two left on them (usually when they say thanks again to our sponsor, make sure to share and rate the podcast) and I skip to the next one. It stores all of these huge audio files that take up many gigabytes of storage because it never marks them as finished and removes them. It should do this automatically.

It would also be nice to have an option to just remove any podcast older than a certain amount of time. Chances are, at least for what I listen to (mainly news relating to politics, tech, movies, etc), it becomes stale and I'm not likely to finish my half-listened to podcast a month later.

So some kind of customizable auto clean feature is all I really want out of Overcast at this point. The only options currently are to delete manually, delete when completed, or delete 24 hours after completed. Maybe I don't want to complete an episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home that started playing one time from February, Marco Arment! There are also settings to limit to a certain number of unlistened episodes, but often it will start another episode and even though I only listened to 10 seconds of it before skipping, it marks it as listening in progress and never deletes it. Then every month I have to go through and delete many gigabytes worth of content.

Maybe it's my fault for having so much content I don't listen to, but I actually don't subscribe to many podcasts. I just subscribe to podcasts that put out frequent content (some 7 days a week), and the ones that are weekly content are usually several hours long, so there are lots of things that are half listened to and never go away.

Yeah, I might try some others sometime. I just like the overall Overcast UI/UX, the Apple Watch app, the controls to speed up individual pods, the ability to shorten pauses and non-vocal content (which is especially great for news pods where they're just recapping things), some of the nitpicky controls such as adjusting forward/backward skip length, Siri integration, and the true black dark mode.

Pocket Casts has all those things except for Watch playback without the phone (PC watch app requires the phone for playback). Not trying to push you one way or the other. OC is great and has great audio quality. Personally, I prefer Castro and PC’s UI/UX far more than OC.

All I want is an option to automatically delete all of my podcasts with a minute or two left on them (usually when they say thanks again to our sponsor, make sure to share and rate the podcast) and I skip to the next one. It stores all of these huge audio files that take up many gigabytes of storage because it never marks them as finished and removes them. It should do this automatically.

It would also be nice to have an option to just remove any podcast older than a certain amount of time. Chances are, at least for what I listen to (mainly news relating to politics, tech, movies, etc), it becomes stale and I'm not likely to finish my half-listened to podcast a month later.

So some kind of customizable auto clean feature is all I really want out of Overcast at this point. The only options currently are to delete manually, delete when completed, or delete 24 hours after completed. Maybe I don't want to complete an episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home that started playing one time from February, Marco Arment! There are also settings to limit to a certain number of unlistened episodes, but often it will start another episode and even though I only listened to 10 seconds of it before skipping, it marks it as listening in progress and never deletes it. Then every month I have to go through and delete many gigabytes worth of content.

Maybe it's my fault for having so much content I don't listen to, but I actually don't subscribe to many podcasts. I just subscribe to podcasts that put out frequent content (some 7 days a week), and the ones that are weekly content are usually several hours long, so there are lots of things that are half listened to and never go away.

Marco has admitted that the current cleanup algorithm is a mess, but he hasn't committed to fixing it, yet. Hopefully, it gets taken care of relatively soon.

Using Pocket Casts or Castro would solve these problems for you…but introduce different ones, of course.