![]() Fortunately, Pocket Casts offers a great Discover section which highlights a range of podcasts. There is an ever-increasing smorgasbord of fantastic podcasts to listen to, so if you want to listen to a new podcast it can be quite difficult to know where to start. It’s just a pity that this custom chapter artwork doesn’t appear in Pocket Casts’ mini player or on the iOS Lock screen or Control Center (for those on the iOS 10 beta). If the podcast has also embedded custom artwork for each chapter, such as Cortex #34, Pocket Casts will display that artwork in the Now Playing screen. Tapping on the chapter title will bring up a list of all the chapters and allow you to jump to any of them. In the center will be the title of the chapter currently playing, with a left arrow and right arrow on either side of the screen, allowing you to jump directly to the previous or next chapter. If the podcast you are listening to has embedded chapters, you’ll notice additional information and buttons appear above the scrubbing timeline. Pocket Casts has excellent support for chapters. They allow the listener to easily skip past a section that doesn’t necessarily pique their interest, but also allows listeners to quickly re-listen to a section without spending minutes scrubbing backwards and forwards to find the start point of the relevant discussion. Having chapters in podcasts is not particularly important to me, but it’s nice to have, particularly for those podcasts which go on for over an hour and discuss different topics. Each are made by fantastic independent developers and all of them are great apps. Frankly, if you’re a fan of podcasts, this advice doesn’t necessarily just apply to Pocket Casts you should take some time over the next few weeks to try Pocket Casts, Castro (a new version of Castro is also coming this month) and Overcast if you haven’t already. Besides, even if it doesn’t, you’ve only lost $3.99. But the point is to encourage you to try it yourself, because you never know, you might just discover that Pocket Casts suits the way you listen to podcasts better than the other options. Not all of them are new to Pocket Casts 6, and some will also exist in other podcast apps. Rather than a traditional review, I thought I’d dive in and highlight a few features of Pocket Casts that I really like. The iPad version now supports multitasking (Split View and Picture in Picture), and whilst it isn’t noticeable to users, almost the entire app has been re-written in Swift. There are new audio effects to trim silences and volume boost for those podcasts which sound too quiet. So, what’s new in Pocket Casts 6? The tl dr version is that the user interface has been redesigned in various ways, most notably with the addition of a dark theme and “up next” queue improvements. It’s also the one with the most cross-platform support, running on iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and on the web. Now on version 6 for iOS, Pocket Casts is the podcast app that has been around the longest (out of those four listed above), first launching in January 2011. Keeping that in mind, just over a week ago was the release of a major new version of Pocket Casts. Instead, which one is best will depend entirely on which app’s design and feature set most closely aligns with how you want to manage and listen to podcasts. Narrowing that field of four to determine which is objectively the best is an almost impossible task from where I stand. There are many options, but I would say that there are four podcast apps in particular that rise above the rest Apple’s own Podcasts app, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and Castro. When it comes to podcast apps on iOS, we are really spoiled for choice. ![]()
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