Apple on Wednesday updated its Podcasts app for iOS, adding a significant number of improvements. While many people complained about the first version of Podcasts, I was quite happy with what they brought out. Many of the things that people thought should be included in this app seemed to be on the high-end side of the fence. I contended when the app was first released, and still believe today, that Apple made a useful app for the majority of users, leaving the high-end market for its third-party developers.
Having said that, it is good to see Apple paying attention to one of its newest iOS apps with so many improvements.
According to Apple the following changes have been made to its Podcasts app:
- Significant improvements to performance and stability
- Podcasts in your library now show the number of unplayed episodes
- Top Stations now show the podcast title if artwork is missing
- Playback speed is now remembered when playing the next episode
- Fix for a problem where the Subscribe button is inactive
- Resolution of an issue where Top Stations artwork may not appear
Sweet christ thank god. The initial release was an abortion of an App that would of been considered crappy even on Android.
I hope this version will stop randomly marking old episodes “unlistened.”
I thought it was just on iOS 6 it was near unusable. But seems it had the same problems on iOS 5 as well :/
“…an App that would of been considered crappy even on Android.”
You must have got the crap one; mine worked very well. Just as well as the Podcast option within the Music App.
” Many of the things that people thought should be included in this app seemed to be on the high-end side of the fence.”
Except for those thousands who wrote up detailed expositions on the App Store of how it… just didn’t work. Nothing high-end side of the fence about that.
In my experience so far, the 1.0.1 release is at least usable, but still a little laggy and slow. 1.0 crashed every time it started.
Supposed to be better. Downloaded and launched. Still no good. Interface lags, unplayed/played status doesn’t sync between “Music” and “Podcasts”, “back catalog” only lists previously downloaded podcasts that aren’t on the device not the actual back catalog from ITMS, and it has already crashed trying to stream an episode.
I tried 1.0 for a while and ended up deleting it. I had some issues that I don’t think were high-end. The two main ones:
Episodes I would mark as played consistently show up as unplayed the next day.
When an episode ended it would start streaming the previous episode even though I had already listened to it.
I’m a little gun-shy about trying 1.0.1. The Music app works really well for playing podcasts. The one thing I miss about the Podcast app is the 30-second skip button. Now that more and more of the podcasts I listen to are including ads, the more I will be wanting that feature. I don’t feel obligated to listen to ads in Judge John Hodgman when I am giving Maximum Fun five bucks a month.
I’m under the impression that podcasts won’t be removed from the Music app in iOS 6 unless you install the Podcasts app. I sincerely hope that’s the case. I haven’t tried 1.0.1 yet, but 1.0 was such a hunk of junk, there’s no wonder it’s rated at two-and-a-half stars. Aside from the issues others are experiencing, the fact that you can’t rate episodes from the Podcasts app makes it useless to me. I rate every episode I listen to, so that I can go back and re-listen to stories I liked, and so if I recommend a podcast to a friend, I can get them interested using an episode I feel is representative of the quality of that podcast.
Also, and this is only slightly related, why does iTunes insist on automatically rating podcasts every few months/episodes (I’m not sure which). This is hard to explain, but, in iTunes, you can rate individual episodes of a podcast, or you can rate the entire podcast–just like you can with music for tracks and albums. If you rate individual episodes, they have filled-in stars indicating their rating, and the podcast itself automatically gets hollow stars indicating the average rating of all the episodes. Or, if you rate the podcast itself, it has filled-in stars, and each unrated episode automatically gets the same number of hollow stars. With me so far?
Here’s the problem. In the first scenario–rating individual episodes–after what seems to be a certain period of time, although it may be after you’ve listened to a certain number of episodes, iTunes automatically sets the rating for the podcast itself equal to the average rating of the individual episodes, but it does so using solid stars. Which means that any unrated episodes now have hollow star ratings equal to that average. Which is a moving target. If you rate a bunch of episodes very low or very high, the average rating changes, and episodes that haven’t been manually rated will reflect that change.
So, once a month or so, I have to go through each podcast in iTunes, and see if it’s been switched to solid stars, and, if it has, click and drag those stars away, so that it has hollow stars again. And a month down the line (or two, or however many episodes–I’m really not sure) it does it again.
The major problem here is this. Let’s say you have a podcast that has an average rating of 3 stars. And iTunes goes ahead and switches to rating the podcast itself 3 stars, rather than taking the average. If I listen to an episode in the Music app, and I try to rate it 3 stars, I can’t, because iTunes has applied 3 stars automatically. Now, let’s say I listen to another 10 episodes, and rate each with 1 star, dragging the podcast’s average rating down to 2 stars. If you go back, that first episode I wanted to rate 3 stars will now have a rating of 2 stars.
Unfortunately, it’s such a confusing issue, I’m having no luck finding anyone else with the problem, or even any mention of it elsewhere.
Sigh. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Carry on, carry on.