I’m not allowed to leave App Store reviews because I’m running the 27 beta, but I’ll be dropping 6 stars as soon as possible for these latest features.
I have a few podcasts where I love the hosts but struggle with the recording quality. These tools have allowed me to tweak playback for those shows in new and specific ways, and I instantly feel happier to listen to said shows again.
Lovely work, Marco.
Two days ago, I redownloaded Overcast (it’s disappointing that I don’t get any perks for having purchased the app in its very early days after the subscription model came along [it used to be that ads were turned off, but I didn’t get the extra premium features, but even that’s now gone], but that’s besides the point).
I connected my NYT subscription with the private feeds, but they don’t seem to auto update. Yesterday, it took multiple refreshes for the latest episode of The Daily to show up.
It took only one refresh this morning, but I would like it to auto update and send me a notification—the notification is sent once the episode shows up after I manually refreshed it.
Is there a way to fix this? Or is it the way it is with the subscription work around? Will we ever be able to connect our subscriptions to Overcast?
Thanks!
I know there's been some recent love for the Watch App here, since Marco said very few people use it. I'm one of those people who uses it daily (walks and runs) and have a request.
TL:DR Move the chapter skip controls to the top of the ... UI (please)
Since the smart speed and voice boost controls have been implemented I had a question about the hierarchy of the UI.
These are controls I rarely touch. However
Skip chapters are something I use pretty much when I'm listening to a podcast. Since the new features were added I now have to scroll down to get to them.
For me it'd make sense to put the Chapters UI at the top of the view, and shift down the other controls, as I use them rarely / never.
I just wanted to put my hand up as a daily (usually twice-daily) user of the Overcast Watch app.
Marco said in last week’s ATP that he looks at the install and usage stats for Overcast on the Watch, and that the number of people with the app installed on their Watch is a small fraction of overall Overcast users. And then said that the number of people who actually use the Watch app is a small fraction of people who have it installed.
I started walking outside twice a day for health reasons after a heart attack last year, and having the app available on the Watch (paired with AirPods) has allowed me to keep my sanity while doing something that is basically repetitive and tedious. Even though there are frustrating areas of my walk where the Bluetooth connection drops (between my wrist and ears!), presumably because some people’s houses generate too much noise around 2.4GHz, the Overcast Watch app is the one thing that means I don’t need to carry my phone with me while walking for 30-45 minutes twice a day.
So to Marco, if you are looking at your stats and see that there is consistently someone in Thailand who uses the Watch app at least once a day, that’s me. I don’t imagine that there are too many of us here who do, though.
I just wanted to say thanks for producing such a useful app!
First of all: thanks for making Overcast. It's without doubt one of my favorite apps that I use every day, and it keeps getting better! In the past, I used Pocket Casts for a while, and while I prefer Overcast in most aspects, there is one feature from Pocket Casts that I'm missing.
Most of the time I'm listening to podcasts for which I want to listen to every new episode, and those are very well handled by the playlists. However, I also have a quite big collection of podcasts that I don't follow constantly, but which I want to have easily available so that I occasionally can go to any of them and listen to an episode. In Pocket Casts, you can switch between a list view and a grid view (with just the cover images for the podcasts) for the whole podcast collection. The grid view (which can be freely sorted) gives a very nice overview where it's possible to easily identify and access any podcast without a lot of scrolling. With the small grid option, I can view 4 x 7, i.e., 28 podcasts, in one screen, while in the Overcast list view, I can view at most 7-8 of them without having to scroll. It would be very nice if such a grid option could be added to Overcast as well.
Keep up the good work!
Everyone hates the strict episode limits, so they're gone!
Now you have visibility and manual control over which episodes are being excluded from the limit, indicated by a diamond-plus in the status label in the episode's cell. In the queue (…) menu on each episode cell, you can toggle this state. It's set by all of the previous paths — manually adding/downloading/playing an episode — and now also if an episode is manually added to a playlist.
There's also now a Set All button in the Episode Limit settings screen.
My TestFlight pool was full, so last night, I deleted any testers who hadn't installed or used a beta build in the past 6 months.
Apple provides filters to show and delete these. But apparently, they work about as well as I should've expected from a part of App Store Connect that very few people at Apple probably ever use. So some people were deleted incorrectly.
If you still want to be on the TestFlight and were inadvertently deleted by this, sorry about that! You should be able to re-join using the link in the settings screen.
I am noticing that all my episodes are skipping the first few seconds of the episode. These podcast do not have any skip intro time configured.
In the latest TestFlight build, Marco has reversed the limit. It just shows how responsive he is to the community. Bravo!!!
I’m finding that if I manually mark an episode or delete an episode, it will automatically download the next episode but if I actually listen to the episode and reach the end it either will not download the next episode or sometimes it will download the episode (with a diamond symbol) but then it downloads 2 extra after that
With the new batch of updates I went in to upgrade from my old one-time Legacy plan to the new pricing model to show my support — but I’m not sure if the pricing here in Germany is right?
List price in the app is $29.99
That’s 25.92 Euro at the current exchange rate. Toss in VAT at 19% and you hit 30.84.
But the paywall says 34.99? Anyone else seeing this in Germany/EU?
What the heck are "Current" episodes?!
For several of the last updates — maybe as far back as the UI change — I’ve found the three-dot menu to be quite unresponsive, whether the one at the top of an episode detail or the mini-menu when you select an episode.
Pressing it seems to do nothing, but pressing it repeatedly sometimes brings up the menu — unless, in your furious tapping, you press one more time than needed, closing the menu instantly.
Since this is the shortest path to getting to the podcast settings, it’s pretty frustrating.
(I also don’t lien that “delete this episode” and “go to podcast” are so close together. One fat finger and I’ve got to manually find the podcast and redownload the episode!)
Any one know the secret ritual or voodoo magic to make this work properly, or does anyone else experience this?
I might be wrong on this, but from all the comments I’ve read, it seems like there’s two opposing viewpoints of what episode limits even means or solves.
How you experience this change is heavily dependent on what you think episode limits is for.
Automatic Download Limits
In the past, and I think in every other podcast player too, it referred to how much the system will automatically download for you. Youre always free to play a different episode or download extra episodes manually to have offline for a flight. And if you paused an episode midway, it sticks around for you until you finish. The limit is about what the system downloads automatically for you in an effort to prevent excessive storage use. And it requires no manual effort from the user.
A quirk here is that if you frequently don’t finish episodes or don’t pay attention to what you’re downloading, you can end up with many episodes saved taking up space and not realize.
Unfinished Plays Cleanup
The new setup seems to be about cleaning up anything that isn’t the latest X number of episodes. This is helpful if you frequently don’t finish episodes (say on a commute) and you just want the new thing the next day. Like the radio.
Without strict cleanup, you might end up with 30 episodes sitting around long after you’re done with them simply bc they have 10 mins left. This is confusing if you’ve set the “limit” to 2 episodes.
I saw someone describe this as a doctors office always having the latest issue of magazines. Old copies get tossed.
A quirk here is that you literally cannot casually play an episode you missed (the app wont let unless you manually delete some first) and if you’re going on a flight you can’t save some up temporarily. If you find a new podcast, you also can’t download a select few interesting backlog ones to keep in your queue as you also listen to new ones. And if you’re paused midway through an episode but want to finish, and a new episode comes out, you lose your download and saved spot in the old episode.
—
My very strong opinion is that these are fundamentally two different problems and should have two different solutions. The frustration seems to be in trying to roll one solution that addresses both problems - how to control automatic downloads vs when to clear away partially played episodes.
But maybe I’m wrong, idk. If you want the strict setting for a different reason, I’d love to understand why.
In all seriousness, this bottom sheet has popped up at least 50 times for me over the last 2 days, sometimes multiple times within 10 seconds. I did a cursory search here to make sure I didn’t miss an obvious thread mentioning the same thing, but maybe I still missed it?
Is there some in-app “acknowledge” dialogue I’m missing where I’m shooting myself in the foot? A known bug? Just want to make sure this isn’t something specific to me.
Haven’t had as much podcast listening time recently, so I learned about the most recent update here. I’m so amused about the episode limit change in that context, relevant xkcd.
Engaging with it more seriously, I think the new change is how I expected it to work when I first found the feature but the old behavior is more flexible and more of a power user thing. I do think adding the “download oldest up to limit” fixes a serious complaint I had with the app that I was doing a Casey-level workaround to avoid before lmao
Please discuss Unforgetful over there! Thanks.
The new system of strictly enforcing episode limits is much worse than the old system it replaced. Please, Marco, change it back.
When I manually add a podcast, I am specifically saying that I want to add that podcast. When I set episode limits I am saying I generally want only this many episodes. The specific instruction should override the general! The phone should never try to second guess my choice to exceed the limit. I put those limits there for you, not for me!
