I listen to podcasts regulary, almost daily. I do it exclusively using my iPhone because I don’t have a single place to be in when doing so. I might enjoy the first part of a show at my desk at home and finish it up during the commute to work.

Occasionally the Podcast App I use will be replaced. After a long period with Overcast as my player of choice I switched back to Castro a couple weeks ago.

While Overcast’s features for removing pauses to save listening time and chapter marks are quite nice it is overally not very nice to use. The UI became unresponsive quite often (e.g. during syncing) and the audio quality during high speed playback doesn’t compare to what Castro delivers. Syncing is a nice feature in theory but ultimately not for me as I only use a single device for all of my listening.

Castro misses a lot of the features Overcast provides, but for me the better audio quality when listening at higher playback speeds makes it the better choice. The most time with a podcast player is spent listening to audio after all. Overcast’s feature to remove silence made me feel uncomfortable when it removed meaningful pauses in conversations. I decided for myself if I don’t have enough time to make silence removal necessary I’d rather wind down on the number of podcasts I subscribed to. So many parts of my life are already paced too fast, so I want at least take my time to enjoy good podcasts.

As usual, I’d like to end with a recommendation of some very good podcasts I subscribed to:

* 99% Invisible
* Anxious Machine
* Checkpoints
* CreativeMornings Podcast