r/overcast

I've been using Overcast for a few years (love it!) and play a lot of podcasts while at the gym, using headphones. Until recently, I was able to control pause/skip/rewind from my Apple Watch. Maybe a couple of weeks ago, the watch controls stopped working. I can bring up the controls on my watch, but pressing forward/rewind/pause has no effect; I can only control the audio from my phone. When I press play/pause it DOES toggle the icon but does not actually affect the audio.

I have restarted my watch, and I also verified that similar controls work for Apple Music, which is really the only other app I use watch-audio-controls with. I have also checked with two different headphone/earbuds connected, and also with no earphones connected (playing podcast on phone, still unable to use controls on watch).

Any ideas for troubleshooting or fixed to get the watch controls working again?

When playing a podcast downloaded to Apple Watch, the progress indicator, showing how much of the podcast you’ve listened to, stays frozen at 1 or 2 minutes into the podcast. While the stop, play, skip-ahead, skip-back controls all work, the progress bar never moves. When a podcast ends, the screen updates to the next podcast, but the progress bar stays at the beginning of the podcast.

While it’s not the most consequential of bugs, it is really annoying.

Is there any way that the transcription system could be given access to the show notes for an episode, and use this text for clues for transcribing people's names and other proper nouns? For example, I've just started following a Tour de France podcast, and the transcription is full of discussion about "Tade Pogaccia" and "Tallypogatcher" and "Tari Pogach" [for Tadej Pogačar, whose name is right there in the show notes]. It's not terribly important, but in cases where someone mentions an unfamiliar name or place it would be nice not to have to go digging through the show notes to figure out what they're talking about

I've got a podcast where it's a group of 4 people -- so not ATP! -- and there's one dude I just can't stand. I'd love to be able to have a setting that skips over his parts.

Edit: I'm already manually skipping ahead. This would be automating a process I already do in 15/30 second increments or using the transcript. A less extreme version of the idea would be a "skip to next speaker" button so that a user can choose when it wouldn't be confusing to skip someone in a specific instance.

I don't know if the transcripts that are generated do speaker detection. If they do, I know it'd likely say something like "speaker 1" "speaker 2" etc. And it wouldn't be consistent across episodes, probably. So this might be tricky to do well. But I'd love do be able to cut someone out.

So I usually listen to shows in my car through carplay, and when I turn off the car the next show starts playing on my phone speaker. This never happened in my old car, and I haven't changed any options on my phone.

Usually if I was listening to something and I turned the car off, the show would stop. I don't have hand off turned on either

Any thoughts as to what's going on? I've been trying to find any settings I might have missed and no joy.

Sorry if this has been addressed before - is there a plan to be able to ask questions about transcripts like “what did they just say about ___?” To be clear I haven’t seen any other podcast app have this but seems like an interesting concept and would increase app screen time usage if Marco wants more ad $.

Just wanted to see if would be possible to put playlist total listening time in playlists. Just a feature I’d love to see so that I know how long I’d be listening or planning trips with podcasts. Thank you for your time.

New in this build:

• Fixed streaming sometimes marking episodes as played if the download failed
• Fixed notification-menu actions (Delete, Queue) failing
• Fixed an "Invalid Audio File" bug introduced in the previous build

In the previous build:

• Fixed sync sometimes resetting your changes shortly after you make them
• Fixed incorrect ordering of new episodes in playlists with priority settings
• Fixed excessive storage usage in certain error conditions
• Fixed episode progress resetting to 0:00 in certain error conditions

If you're not on the TestFlight yet, you can join from the app's settings screen.

I keep hearing that AI is getting incredibly good at finding bugs in software, so I'm not going to hide the truth here: I used Claude to find and fix the top-reported bugs in Overcast. These are so nuanced, intermittent, or difficult to reproduce that I haven't been able to fix them myself for months (or years):

• Sync sometimes resets your changes shortly after you make them
• Incorrect ordering of new episodes in playlists with priority settings
• Unexpectedly large storage usage (usually corresponding to download failures)
• Episode progress resets to 0:00 on some failures or output-device changes

For each one, I gave an AI prompt like "Users are reporting X behavior, which is probably related to component Y. Figure out why, fix it, and add an exhaustive test suite to verify the fix."

Fixing them all, excluding tests, was only 82 changed lines of code.

Some are hard to test (like the progress-resetting one, which relies on unusual conditions like AirPods crashing), but I reviewed each change, and they all look good to me — and I never would've figured them out on my own.

If you don't want to use an app that has ever been touched by AI, I understand. Everyone has a line, and everyone has their reasons.

I've seen what it can do for my situation, and I'll gladly use AI, selectively and intentionally, to make my software better and solve my customers' issues in ways that I never could on my own.

If you're not on the TestFlight yet, you can join from the app's settings screen.

If this does not fit here, feel free to remove. I can’t find this information anywhere, so this felt like the best place to ask.

I make a serialized fiction/audio drama, and I know the show is available through Overcast and Apple Podcasts, but I can’t actually see what the listener-side experience looks like inside Overcast from my end.

So I’m trying to understand it from the user side.

For people who listen to fiction, horror, serialized stories, or audio dramas on Overcast:

What makes a show easy or annoying to navigate?

A few things I’m trying to figure out:

- Can you usually tell where the actual starting point is?

- Does season/episode structure come through clearly?

- Do episode descriptions matter much in Overcast?

- Are chapter markers useful for fiction/audio drama, or do most people ignore them?

- Is there anything creators commonly mess up that makes a feed harder to follow?

I’m not looking for analytics or listener data. I’m trying to make the feed cleaner and easier to follow for people using podcast apps like Overcast.

Serialized fiction has a different problem than a normal talk podcast. If someone lands on the wrong episode, they may have no idea where they’re supposed to begin.

Any advice from regular Overcast users would help.

I’d love a way to exclude all podcasts in a playlist from a second playlist.

I have three playlists:

1. “maincast” (mostly tech news, limited selection of podcasts)

2. “language learning” (some podcasts in a language I’m actively learning)

3. “slowcast” (everything else, used less often)

it’s a pain in the butt to keep my slowcast updated as I subscribe to new podcasts in any of the other two playlists. I’d like our existing playlists to show up in the “exclude” menu so I can just say exclude anything in “maincast” and “language learning” and it will just stay up to date.

would be nice if you could add that. doesn’t even need to be fancy - just make the playlist show up in the list like any other podcast. (Though it would be nicer to have them sorted in a section at the top.)

Hi, don’t know if this is a bug but it’s confusing and unwelcome. At random times I now have to close a page I didn’t open to use the app.

Apologies if this subreddit is for feature requests only and not bugs.

Behaviour I am seeing:

• I have seen an episode in All Episodes but not played it
• I later go back into All Episodes
• It is not there any more.
• There is a newer episode released (may or may not be relevant)

Is anyone else experiencing this behaviour?

It's in the post-credits section. I've been tinkering with Claude myself. I'm amazed at what it can do and how quickly it is evolving and improving.

At the time this happened I was had the Touch Bar M1 Pro with only 256G storage. Used a trial version of Daisy Disk to locate the files and manually deleted them via a terminal.

Why is there no way to go to the podcast from an episode entry in a playlist (vs the link from the currently playing episode) in the iPhone app? Does it seem like a fundamental functionality that is missing to anyone else?

On (I think) ATP 692, you mentioned changing the queue behavior to be more in-line with “user” expectations.

You probably don’t hear from people who love it, because why would you? So I just wanted to stump for its current behavior. Please maintain it as an option if you make other changes to it. At the end of the day, it’s probably the most important feature in the app to me.

How do you adjust or stop location services in the app? I was in Italy getting ads in Italian. There is some tracking but I am unable to find any setting to adjust it.