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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Google Podcasts was great. AntennaPod is horrific. It won't auto download new episodes no matter how many redundant settings I try to switch back and forth. Every other app I just hit the auto-download toggle and it works flawlessly. There's also no way to "expire" old episodes so anything you don't listen to is just stored forever.
Also sometimes it just literally does nothing. Push the play button and nothing at all happens.
Auto-downloads work wonderfully here and can even be set per-podcast which is such a nice feature.
Not saying this to denigrate your experience but to perhaps soften the 'is horrific' notion into somewhat more of a 'does not work for you' one. Otherwise, I suppose Pocket Casts is also open source nowadays - or has always been and I did not notice? But that was a reasonably good alternative for me as well before I switched to AntennaPod.
I've tested this on 4 or 5 different devices and each of them had major problems.
Several people have argued with me before that it works "fine" only to later admit that they don't even use it.
By all means, if you have the time to pfaff with it, give it a shot. Personally I listen to podcasts when driving and can't be diving through the 394718024 different settings to figure out how to just make it work while driving down the road.
I use it daily and it's great. It has really granular controls and I only download some podcasts and even those I can cancel the auto download if it has a word reference I don't want. My only complaint is the syncing between devices which admittedly is not great.
That is a little of how I use it too - I have all podcasts set to download automatically globally (set it up to 25 episodes at the same time) and put them in my queue so I always have exactly 25 episodes to listen to in any order there each day.
Then there are 2 daily podcasts that I do not let automatically download (but automatically refresh, and I love that the app delineates between the two), however one regularly produces longer episodes including a lot of the shorter ones that I do let it automatically download. Huh, I never realized how advanced the setup actually is. Though I do remember the actual 'setting up' being relatively painless after getting to grips with the global/per-podcast difference.
Also, fwiw I have the synchronization set up using one of the self-hosted options instead of the default gpodder service - which is often down intermittently - and it works well enough, even if a bit slow every now and again.