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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Google podcast used to be my goto podcast app. I really liked that it was ad-free and you could download to listen during your commute. This offline listening feature didn't work properly on Spotify. I will miss google podcast.
Try AntennaPod, seems to have most of the podcasts I listen to, except 2 that are Spotify exclusives.
As a point of order, AntennaPod doesn't "have" any podcasts; they're all publicly available in a web standard RSS format, so you can get those podcasts on any podcast aggregator/player like Overcast, Podcast Addict, or (my personal favorite) Pocket Casts. In that vein, I recommend choosing your podcast player based on features, not availability.
Google Podcasts also supported entering RSS feeds manually.
Yeah, but what I'm trying to say is that, functionally, that's really all podcasts are. Google Podcasts (and many other podcast aggregators) glosses it over with some really shiny interface that lets you find shows better, and Spotify locks those RSS feeds behind a paywall, but at its core that's all a podcast is. So AntennaPod doesn't "also have them," they're the exact same product.
Ah true. Companies are great at hiding the open web that they (ab)use.
Otoh, Spotify (and probably apple and other big corps) don't even allow you to add RSS URLs, so I wanted to point out they Google was one of the big players which was more open.
Actually Apple does allow it, but yeah, Spotify is a bad citizen here. I only used Google Podcasts once or twice, but good on them for giving the option. At least for as long as they were around.
Not at launch. Google Play Music did, iirc, which is why I switched to Podcast Addict when GPM lost podcast support and they launched Google Podcasts. People complaining that Google Podcasts is another incidence of "Google replaced a good app with a bad one" are missing the detail that this is also Google Podcasts' origin story. Get off the treadmill.
I do feel genuinely bad for any developers who had to work on a dead-end product like that though.
Thanks for the recommendation, AntennaPod does just what I need.
I tried AntennaPod because folks on lemmy/kbin/beehaw/wherever have been recommended it, but it was being a bit weird with the only 'podcast' I listen to: Critical Role campaigns.
With Google Podcasts, they'd load in with a "Welcome to the Critical Role podcast" intro by one of the players, then go into the fanfare and then into the game. With AntennaPod, it would load (from the same subscription) with at least one ad right off the bat for some reason. I tried it a few times (granted, with just one episode (campaign 1, session 115)) and even uninstalled and reinstalled, and still had ad(s) at the front... I didn't bother to scrub through to see if it had more ads in the middle bits, because one ad was too many, ya know?
I then tried out Pocket Casts (another recommendation) and the podcast behaves exactly like the Google Podcasts one does... no ads.
Not sure why, but that is how it worked when I tried it at least so other folks may run into a similar situation based on the podcast(s) in question.
I started getting the pre-roll ads for Critical Role when using Google Podcasts maybe a couple months ago. It seems like they're using a service which stitches ads in when the audio file is served so they can serve more up to date or regional ads. So if you had downloaded a bunch of CR at once months ago on Google Podcasts it might explain the behavior. Not sure why PocketCasts wouldn't have the same unless they're Caching episodes on PocketCast servers when they're first uploaded instead of downloading them from CR servers each time.
I'm essentially re-listening to the campaigns during my lunch break so if they all start getting annoying ads going forward I'll just go back to getting audio books from OverDrive I suppose.
The first campaign is still on their old Nerdist/Geek and Sundry listing (the newer ones look to be from stitcher.com), so I'm wondering if once I get through the ones there the newer stuff won't all be like that going forward.