Podcast Addict: auto-download podcast episodes to your Android device

If you are subscribed to one or multiple podcasts, you may like the idea of listening to those shows on your Android device. Instead of listening to music while commuting, jogging or shopping, you can instead tune in to a podcast. While it may not always be the best choice, it sometimes can be a valid option, and especially so if you are subscribed to informative podcasts that teach something.

Podcast Addict is a free, ad-driven, application for Android that you can use to get your regular podcast fix. What sets it apart are a couple of things: First, the options it makes available to subscribe to podcasts, and second its automatic download feature that you can use to download podcasts to your device so that you can listen to the shows while you are offline.

While other podcast apps may offer similar features, it is the complete package that makes PodCast Addict that attractive.

Podcast Addict

The application offers several means to subscribe to podcasts. You can use the internal search engine or browse various podcast suggestions, add podcasts via RSS, import an OPML file, or add the contents of a folder directly to the application.

It takes only a couple of taps to subscribe to a new podcast which is then automatically added to the apps' front page and the my subscriptions page.  To add new podcasts simply tap on the plus icon at the top right corner to get started.

The search is quite good and finds a lot of podcasts as far as I can tell. The results listing is a bit of a mess though and you may need to comb through the results a bit to get what you are searching for.

Once you have added the podcast you can open it to start listening right away, or, download the episodes displayed to you instead. This works only if you are connected to a WiFI network unless you modify the preferences of the application first.

You can download individual episodes if you like, or open the menu button to download all unread episodes at once.  What is not so good is that you are limited to a selection of episodes, e.g. the last 5 or 10 with no apparent option to download earlier podcast episodes as well.

The apps' preferences are quite extensive: you can configure update, download and streaming behavior here for example. This includes options to configure automatic downloads of new episodes of subscribed podcasts, when and how they are downloaded, and where the episodes are stored.

Here you can also modify the audio player's preferences including options to change the playback speed from the default 1.0x in 0.1 increments or decrements (this does not seem to work properly right now).

An internal audio player is used to playback all podcasts by default which you can change in the options so that you can select one of the other available audio players on the system for playback instead.

Verdict

The program has a few minor quirks that need to get sorted out, like the broken playback speed changer or the missing option to download earlier episodes of a podcast. All in all though that is something that many users may be able to deal with, especially since the overall feature set of the application is quite impressive. You can make a donation to get rid of the advertisement in the player's interface if that bothers you.

Advertisement