Saturday, November 16, 2013

App introduction: BeyondPod

BeyondPod is one of my most used apps as it's my daily podcast driver.




Podcasts in general


Podcasts in general are mostly radio, TV or internet shows, available to download. In most cases the podcast supplier is providing a link to download or directly listen to the podcast within the browser. That's nice, when your sitting at your PC but to listen to the podcasts on the way you will have to download them and copy to your mp3 player manually.
This is where pod-catchers come in to play.

Pod-catchers


Pod-catchers are basically apps that cover a wide list of podcasts available to be subscribed to automatically download and replay them on your mobile device for traveling. Most of this apps have tons of podcasts in a list preinstalled where you can pick from or they also allow to manually add podcasts by a link or search term.

BeyondPod


There are plenty of very good pod-catchers out there and I have not tested all of them, by far. In fact I stick with BeyondPod since a few years as I am very satisfied with this app and don't see any need to change.

subscriptions and category

For me the important features are:
  • add individual podcasts
  • manage them in categories
  • separate video and audio podcasts by filtering
  • automated downloads
  • automated managing of stored unplayed / played podcasts including deletion
    • by time
    • by numbers
BeyondPod provides all this features and even more. One of this additional features for example is a sync between different devices of your current state of listening (of course, this only works on the same podcasts when it's subscribed on multiple devices). 
There is also a different version of BeyondPod available for tablets to fit into the wider screen that is mostly used in a horizontal direction.

tablet version

My setup


So I have subscribed many podcasts (most about tech topics) and I have set up the system in a way that it downloads new episodes automatically over night. I restricted it to do it's job when the device is connected to a WiFi only.
Also it only downloads the latest episodes, in fact only the last and newest episode of each subscribed podcast.
Further on I have set some rules for deletion too, so that I have a maximum of the latest three episodes of each podcast but I keep them for at least seven days. This way I don't need to take care about that my self and my devices will not run out of memory because of a flood of podcasts stored on it.
It might sound a bit complicated now but most of this settings are the default preset settings or I just adjusted them a bit to my needs.

So this way when I grab my smartphone in the morning the latest episodes are ready for me to listen to when I commute. The best on that is that I don't have to care about, it's all done automatically.

episodes on the device
There is also a widget and lockscreen-widget available that I use sometimes but mostly I just use the basic media controls on the lockscreen or open the app when I want to set up my playlist for today.

My podcasts


Just a short list of some of the podcasts I am listening to:
I also would like to mention that I tend to watch the more weekly podcasts as a video podcast on my tablet while I listen to the daily stuff as audio versions while I travel to work or back.

player view

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