I know there have been updates on my feeds, but I don't know how to force podlisten to fetch them.

Overall, great app. I use it all the time and in general it works great. Thank you :)

However, one "bug" (or maybe just questionable behaviour) that I've noticed:

I have PodListen set to hourly updates because I like to get new podcasts ASAP. I therefore get a notification hourly. However, it usually says that there are no new podcasts. This is a pointless notification and I'm sick of having to constantly swipe it away. This functionality should be fixed so that the notification is only shown if there are new podcasts. Or at the very least, it should be a user configurable option to only notify if there is new content (in case some people like to see that the update has happened but there is no new content).

AFAIK, (because I don't using it myself), iTunes will stop updating a podcast if you haven't listened to at least one of its episodes in five days.

I thought it could be a useful optional feature, if your great app would stop auto-downloading podcasts, which last episode(s) aren't listened for a period of time X.

I don't know if anybody else could be interested in such a feature? It's just meant as a suggestion.

Using 4.2.2

First off, thanks for making a quick and usable podcast client. The one use-case I am missing is for audiobooks from librivox.org. Typically I have the episodes to auto-download only when "Episodes are added to playlist" as I don't want all 1.43GB of a large book like https://librivox.org/the-count-of-monte-cristo-by-alexandre-dumas-2/ to download all at once. So if the episodes could be sorted in the given feed order (http://librivox.org/rss/6263) even if pubDate is not set in the given feed that would be helpful (otherwise searching through the random order to find the next chapter is a bit of a chore).

Thanks!

I've just pressed this shiny orange stair-like button next to my podcasts. All the potcasts disappeared, with no way to cancel and no confirmation button

First, many thanks for this great app! What would it make even more useful for me and maybe others is an indicator if an episode was already listened to. I know there is the progress bar, but when the episode is started again, e.g. accidentally after finishing the episode before in the play list, the progress bar will start over. Therefore, it would be great if an indicator would be added that tells if it is the first time that I listen to the episode. This would help especially with episodes that start with equal content such as ads.

An implementation possibility would be to slightly color the episode's background with a traffic light indicator (or have a dedicated icon or only color the inner area of the progress bar or add a vertical colored bar to the left or right edge of the episode; many possibilities here), e.g. with green meaning “started listening”, yellow meaning “more than 2/3 done” and red meaning “only 5% left”. According to this status information, PodListen could jump over red episodes when progressing through the play list.

Additionally, it would be great if one could manually remove the indicator from episodes that should be listened to a second time. The red indicator would not hinder them being started with the play button, but removing the red indicator would mean to consider these episodes again while progressing through the play list.

Furthermore, it would be great if the indicator would persist even for deleted episodes. Bringing these episodes back from the feed (e.g. if deleted by accident) would still indicate that they have been listened to. To transfer the list to a new phone, an import/export feature would be helpful as well. With this, one could even manually sync 2 devices with this information (suitable import and export rules given, e.g. export will export all information but import will overwrite only with the farther progressed status, e.g. red beats green but not the other way round).

Hi einmafel (and thanks for great apps ^^)

when I want to resume podcast and connect my phone to BT Audio in car, after hit the play button, the file rewind automatically to beginning (not at the resume mark).

After connect, if I play and resume it's work.
If I disconnect and reconnect and want to resume it's fail and back to the beginning.

Best regards.

I get this consistently when trying to download any of the episodes from the Functional Geekery show.

Most of my potcasts stop playing a few seconds before their end: I always miss the last sentences. Sometimes when I listen to the same podcast a second time I will get the end, sometimes not.

There's no 'delete episode and do nothing' option in the Playback Complete settings. Very surprising in a nearly perfect podcast player.

How can we add some predefined default feeds?

Thank you for PodListen. I really like this piece of non-cluttered, ad- and spyware-free free software!

As I use this app very often, there were some itches. So I started to implement the listed changes for my personal use. Perhaps they are useful for others as well, but I'd like to get some feedback before opening pull requests.

1. • Localize format of episode date shown in episode list element. Hardcoded YYYY-MM-DD is very uncommon in some countries. (See sgelb@35e54fc)
2. • Move episode url in episode list element to last line below the expanded description. This information is not often used. As a clickable link, it often catches the touch event to expand the episode description. Fixes #32. (See sgelb@7f53f35)
3. • The episode url view was used to show errors. Replaced it with an extra textview for this. It is not shown as long as there's no error. (See sgelb@b74f410)
4. • Remove the (nowadays uncommon placed) settings button and add an action bar/app bar instead. This also provides a place for additional features like a search field (see #20).
5. • Show elapsed/remaining/total time of episode. Perhaps instead of size (move size info below the fold) and for started episodes only? Or on the controls, instead of the removed settings button? As part of the progress bar?
6. • Use drag and drop to reorder episodes in playlist. I'm usually on my bike while listening to often rather short podcasts. Stopping and manually starting the correct next episode is a PITA.

What do you think?

edit: use numbered list

I'm used to listening to tech talks sped up. Additionally, my commute is short, and I'd like to consume my podcasts in a shorter amount of time.
This feature will not affect the minimality of the interface if you put it in the settings and/or activate it with a long press of the play/pause button, and should be easy to implement.
If you decide to implement it, I suggest a slider with min/max corresponding to that on youtube videos (0.25x to 2x).
Thank you for the consideration.

Hi

I am using your app for quiet a while now and a long term issue started to occur. - my "new episodes" tab gets too long and it starts to eat up a remarkable amount of free space on my phone ^^

This has diffrent reasons i supscribed to a podcast that is only 2 mins and comes everyday.
And also a one hour one that is also a dayly one and i couldnt keep up.

ok actually i have 2 diffrent problems here.
the 2 mins one i manage to listen quiet well, but i'm tired of deleting it after listening. and i would be happy for an auto deletion function.

the hourly one is much more complex and sometimes i want to keep some of them for longer to listen again or show to friends and family.

so i thought about a solution:

Setting Auto deletion rules per subscription.

i could auto delete my 2 min podcast
i could still delete my 1 hour podcast manually

But now i still have the problem of too many of the 1 hour podcasts in my new episode list, since i did not take the time to listen to all of them.
so eventually i would like to change an auto-deletion after 5 days/episodes setting to that subcruption too. but then A - i will have to listen to the podcasts im really interested in within 5 days and B the old ones i really enjoyed would be deletet as well.
So my solution for that is.

Adding option to favourise episodes.

you would kind of long press and say favourite and it will get a star attached to it
this episodes would not get deleted (by any automatism) unless done manually (or get unfaved again)

i would still have to decide within 5 days wether i want to listen to an episode or not but at least i would not have to listen to it.

so i think that's it. i also read the issue #14 and i think this one:

BTW I have a request from another user who suggests a cool way of handling news podcasts by adding per-feed "auto-download" and "auto-delete" preferences. This allows to tell PodListen explicitly something like "download automatically two latest episodes of NPR news and delete automatically older ones"

would be the best idea in that thread.
But i don't see so much why we would need auto download feature per subscription as well. It shouldnt bother the phones recources so much if it checks for new updates for one or 10 subscriptions. the only thing it could be usefull for is some podcast i want to downlaod via 3g/4g and some only wifi. (but i really think the majority of all people will be fine with download via wifi only anyway)
and with only autodeletion prefernce "keep only 2 latest" you would archive same result but with only one function.

thoughts on implementation in UI

• for the per subsciptions preference i sugges a "preferences" icon right under the "list" icon that is already there (in the subcriptions tab)

for the favourise function

• i think it sould be accessible in playlist and new episodes view
• trigger by long press (deletion function would have to be adjusted for that too)
• trigger by double press on the icon and the star appears (very little) in the upper left or bottom right corner of the icon as well. (i just like that ideo quite much)

thank you very much best greeetings from swees ^^

Now that we have a complete podcast episodes list available, it would be useful to know which episodes were listened to / downloaded / added to the playlist before.Won't take much speace per podcast, may perhaps be forgotten when the podcast is removed.

Hi everyone,
This can be useful when you have a long list of subscriptions. Currently the list is sorted by added date.
Thank you!

A full text search of episodes would be nice (I can't find an episode I passed by earlier :P). Could perhaps be available universally across lists - hence the general title, edit as wanted. Feel free to call this low priority if you have other stuff on your plate.

Hello everyone,
Podlisten is by far the best podcast app. I subscribe to lots of interesting podcast, I don't want all of them push to new episodes list, but I also want to keep them so I can find them if I want to.
Will it be a good idea to separate the subscription into two list, one can push to the new episodes list and one just serve as bookmarks, and the user can add items in bookmarks to the push list?
Thank you!

I'm having trouble using this podcast: http://podcast.hr-online.de/lateline/podcast.xml

In the "subscriptions" tab I get this error message:
Refresh failed: unexpected type (position:TEXT Society & Cultur...@25:41 in java.io.InputStreamReader@41c2d650) (XmlPullParserException)

When searching for new episodes I get this output from adb logcat: adb_logcat_podlisten_refresh.txt

Maybe the xml is invalid, but the file works in other applications.

Is it possible to add a feature to allow listing audio files in a folder on the device as if they were in a feed? I want to be able to listen to audio books with the same app that I listen to podcasts with.

This is something that I can do with BeyondPod version 3.3 which I want to replace because it's out of date now, I won't use their latest version because they did a horrible new "material design" interface.

My phone has enough real estate for four subscriptions on the screen, so if I have (say) twenty subscriptions and go looking for a particular subscription, I have to scroll through five pages to find it.

The list appears to be in random order right now. Could they instead be sorted alphabetically by podcast title? That would simplify searching.

There's only one option with a radio button in options.
I'd like to keep episodes on my external SD card instead of on my phone.

The "podlisten refreshed" notification is always visible. I find that a bit annoying.

I have downloaded some podcasts with the intention of listening to them when I don't have internet access but if I wait too long the downloads are deleted before I get a chance to listen to them. It seems to take a week to be deleted.

Can this please be fixed. That is, don't delete a podcast unless it is listened to.

I store the podcasts on the SDcard of this makes a difference.

Would it be possible to pull podcast feed URIs from web pages, along the lines of the feed detection Firefox can perform? Most sites don't adhere to any particular standard for placing, naming, or listing feed URIs, making it a pain to find, copy, and enter each syndication URI manually.

Anything PodListen could do to automate this would be great.

Thanks!

Environment

• Stock Android 7.1.2
• Nexus 6
• PodListen 1.3.6 from FDroid

Steps to reproduce

1. Play a podcast
2. Wait for more notifications such as email and various IM service messages

Observed

PodListen control notification sinks to the bottom of the notification stack.

Expected

PodListen control notification stays at or near the top of the notification stack.

Part of the problem with this is that it becomes inaccessible on the lockscreen

Edit: I need to stop submitting issues from my phone :/ Completed my fat fingered post.

Hi everyone,
When you find a good episode and want to share it or save it for later use, it will be very nice to do that in the playlist interface. Just move the file to the archive folder and rename it to be the podcast name. Of course replace spaces with underscores. What do you think?
Thank you!

It would be great to see support for queueing podcasts in Android media players (NRG, Poweramp, Google Play Music, etc.). I assume single-track support wouldn't be too hard; if possible, it would be nice to see some form of playlist support for listening to multiple podcasts back-to-back.

I don't know enough about the available Android APIs to ask for simple M3U8 export or the ability to send multiple track names to a player via API...

Thanks!

When I add a podcast in portrait mode and rotate the device before saving, the feed URL input field empties itself. Rotating it back doesn't restore the URL.

Android 4.3, latest podlisten.

Downloads keep restarting, never resolve.

Downloads work with other podcasters, and internet is fine in browser.

How can I help you help me? :)

Aloha.

EDIT: looks like changing my download location may have cured the problem -- apologies for any adrenaline expended.

Hi everyone,
Does any of you want to change the setting of amount of episodes to fetch for a subscription? Currently you have to unsubscribe and resubscribe, because the setting is only available at the subscribing interface.
Thank you!

Don't know if this happens to others but, in my case, if a add a episode to the playlist for later, the said episode is automatically downloaded as expected. however after a while (a few days i guess) the downloaded file for that episode is eventually deleted automatically and without user intervention, preventing me from listening to it when i am offline.
I have browsed the settings for some relevant one, that disables automatic deletion of downloaded episodes but couldn't find anything... Is there a solution for this problem?

the thing i would like to have most while using the app to actually listen to podcast is to start and stop and maybe jump back my 30 sex from lockscreen. for everytime someone starts talking to me why im listening or the train arrives or departs or something elso noisy happens.

yould just make it a lot quicker :)

Hi everyone,
I am thinking if you can add a scroll bar to the right of a long list or make the right edge area to be the quick scroll area. In that area, when the finger is at the top, the list scrolls to the beginning, and when the finger is at the bottom, the list scrolls to the end.This is useful when you want to scroll down a very long list of items, you need to swipe a very long time to get to the last read point.
Thank you!

Hi everyone,
Some episodes may look interesting, but after listening for a few minutes, you may find it is not worth listening to. I would like a feature to pause and resume downloading and playing unfinished downloads for a preview. Just to save data usage.
Thank you!

Fantastic app, Using this from the feature-rich paid Podcast addict app because of its neat and simple UI. I hope you keep it neat and simple.

After being refreshed, it leaves a persistent, undismissable, animated notification that download is paused ( I've Download options set to WiFi only/ charging). It remains even after force quitting the app.

Maybe an option in the "auto refresh subscriptions" to have a custom time to refresh + download subscriptions or a manual refresh + download button under the " subscription " tab ( Not Auto )

I added the feed: http://www.radioeins.de/archiv/podcast/zwei_alte_hasen.feed.podcast.xml, but podlisten never showed me any new episodes. Also when adding the feed and setting to import all episodes or all of the last month does not come up with anything.

Have i missed anything?

I know this app has to stay lightweight, but I really miss being able to pause playback upon yanking the headphones from my phone or switching off/loosing signal on a bluetooth headset.

Is there a way to add a refresh button without clearing off downloaded podcasts?
OR
Moving downloaded podcasts between playlist and downloaded tabs?

I listen to several foreign language podcasts as a language learning aid, and often rely on the accompanying text transcription to follow along. In the interest of not having to hold my phone up to my face the whole time, an option to increase the display size of episode text (the rest of the UI is fine at the current size) would be very welcome. Thanks for your consideration!

Hello everyone,
I think it is unnecessary to display the url in the user interface, the space can be better used to describe the content. What do you think?

Does this app make use of these useful podlove features?

Maybe this feature exists and I'm just missing how to do it, but I'd like to scroll through a show's back catalogue (ie its RSS feed's contents) and pick random episodes into the playlist.

Use cases:

1. I'd like to go back to an older show where they talked about X and listen to it again.
2. In the New Episodes page I accidentally deleted the wrong new episode, so now it's gone forever

The "New Episodes" page is good at fetching episode summaries as they come out, but AFAICT there's not a way to see random episodes?

i saw on someone elses phone, that if you were on a website opening a podcast feed android would promt if you want to open the feed with - the podcast app that person had installed ( cant remember which (but was closed source)).

This would be a quite convenient way to add a podcast directly from browsing. (would make copy pasting stuff obsolete)

Also if it would be possible to extend that "mimetype registration" to regular mp3 links let's say would also be great because if i just want to listen one longer file let's say if i just could send it to podlisten my regular listening enviroment would be great also because podsliten does cash it for me and remembers where i was :D

Ever since #8 was closed, I keep my podcasts on an external SD card. Sometimes when I try to play episodes which appear downloaded* because they were, they start downloading again. I've checked my cache dir this time and it was the default one instead of the one I set. Why? Your guess is better than mine (mine is that the directory auto-reverts to default dir when SD card unaccessible, possibly due to phone crashing or maybe weather?).

Suggestion: I'm guessing the reverts-to-default-when-custom-dir-unavailable functionality needs not be removed if episodes were not marked as not downloaded when changing directories. So just don't mark things, it seems* there already is a test for whether the file is where it should be or not. Optionally, you could also make the test measure file size so that partially downloaded things need not be downloaded from the beginning (I can open another issue for the latter thing if you want).

I typed this out quickly, so if I'm not making a lot of sense, I'll clarify upon request.

Hi everyone,
Often I tried to search for a podcast in the database with a keyword, after adding an episode and I return to the search interface, I need to type in the keyword again. Will it be better for the program to remember the search? Or can I add multiple subscriptions from the search results?

If "Play next episode in playlist" is enabled, then once episode A finishes playing PodListen will jump to epsode B, but leave episode A at 100% such that tapping on A again will automatically jump to B. At this point it's impossible to replay episode A.

The flipside of the existing "Pause on headphones disconnect", and useful for the same reasons...

I suggest to implement settings for building single purpose PodListen app similar to AntennaPodSP. Initial feed setting can be placed in a xml file (feeds.xml) residing in raw folder. If this file contains address of podcast feed then it should import on first run of app. Simply ignore the file if empty and app should behave like current version. In this way PodListen app will be very popular among radio station and personal pod-casters.