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Replacement for Podcasts on Mac and iOS?

A

aperantos

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 18, 2008
169
184
London, U.K.
For a very log time I have used podcasts by downloading in iTunes, where they are organized into smart playlists, which I also sync to my iPhone.

Apple broke this long ago when it removed playlists from the Podcasts iOS app. So now to listen to podcasts on my phone I need to go into the Downloaded section and manually find and create ah on-the-go playlist every time. "Stations" do not work for me as they do not allow enough control over what gets included within them. As a result I listen to fewer podcasts because listening is such a hassle.

But now Apple has broken even that, introducing a bug that means at random my iPhone will just delete all the downloaded podcasts. One-by-one, that you can watch happening in real time.

It is my fault for being too lazy to not do anything about this sooner. Besides, my MacBook is still on Mojave just for iTunes, just so I can sync from it to my iPhone. So if I can replace it then I can finally upgrade.

So can anyone recommend anything that can replicate that way of working? A Mac app for downloaded and managing podcasts, and an iOS client that can sync with it to only copy across selected episodes, ideally in separate playlists.

Thank you
 
You could check out Downcast; I've used it for years and always found it reliable. It syncs podcasts and playlists between MacOS and iOS. I'm not sure about only copying across selected episodes. As far as I can see the easiest way to select episodes is to swipe out those you don't want to hear.
 
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I’ve enjoyed Overcast very much. It has both Mac and iOS apps, and can be accessed via web too. I don’t know the extent of its capabilities to match your use case; others here who are power users may know better.
 
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Jeffois said:
I’ve enjoyed Overcast very much. It has both Mac and iOS apps, and can be accessed via web too. I don’t know the extent of its capabilities to match your use case; others here who are power users may know better.
Click to expand...
There's no Mac version of Overcast. The iPad version can run on Apple Silicon Macs, but that won't help the OP who's using an old Mac stuck on macOS Mojave.
 
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chrfr said:
There's no Mac version of Overcast. The iPad version can run on Apple Silicon Macs, but that won't help the OP who's using an old Mac stuck on macOS Mojave.
Click to expand...
Fair point. I was thinking of the fact that I can use it, but I'm on an M1. You're absolutely right.
 
The reviews on the U.K. Mac App store for Downcast are mixed at best, though the main problem is it requires Catalina so I will have to set up a test partition to try it out. It does seems to support playlists and the screenshots make it look like they could work how I want, so it may be just what I need. The bit that worries me is that the help pages on the spare web site say that syncing is "via iCloud," which will sounds slow and inefficient compare to copying directly, and will mean subscribing for enough storage.

I will probably end up upgrading to a Silicon MacBook sooner rather than later, but I am the person who liked the TouchBar! So at the moment I am happy with my current Intel model which rules out Overcast.

Thanks for the suggestions.
 
aperantos said:
The reviews on the U.K. Mac App store for Downcast are mixed at best, though the main problem is it requires Catalina so I will have to set up a test partition to try it out. It does seems to support playlists and the screenshots make it look like they could work how I want, so it may be just what I need. The bit that worries me is that the help pages on the spare web site say that syncing is "via iCloud," which will sounds slow and inefficient compare to copying directly, and will mean subscribing for enough storage.

I will probably end up upgrading to a Silicon MacBook sooner rather than later, but I am the person who liked the TouchBar! So at the moment I am happy with my current Intel model which rules out Overcast.

Thanks for the suggestions.
Click to expand...
You could use the Overcast web player, however. Functionality is nowhere close to the actual app, but it's there.
As for Downcast's syncing, it happens over iCloud but the actual podcasts aren't stored on iCloud so storage demands are minimal– it's just syncing your podcast listings, playback positions, etc.
 
Back to the original question.

Unless I'm missing something (that would be nice), there's no way to import all those podcasts I've archived with iTunes on an external drive and never listened to over the years into the Podcasts app. Plus, Podcasts stores any downloaded podcasts onto the SSD system drive of the computer, with goofy names, which isn't what I want.

I've just tried Downcast, but haven't figured out how to import saved podcasts into the Downcast database yet. I've certainly tried. But, at least it allows me to store the files on the external drive.

So, is there a good alternative? Or, does anybody know how to get Downcast to import saved podcasts? Install iTunes with Retroactive? I'm not proud and will happily show my ignorance here for a solution that works...
 
I use Mimir on my Mac and Pocket Casts on my iPhone. One cool feature is that I can export my entire Pocket Casts library to an OPML file and import that into Mimir on the Mac.
 
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