Speaker 1: Hi everyone, this is Laura Hammack from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video I'll tell you about my favorite podcast app, Stitcher, why I like it better than the others that I've tried, and I'll take you through all the features that I like the best. So I have been on a hunt for the best podcast app now for years. Stitcher is the fourth one that I've tried and I like it the best by far. So in case you are interested, the others that I tested out were the indigenous Apple podcast app, iCatcher, and Overcast. Stitcher has a premium service which involves content, but I just use the free app. So for whatever reason, I have found podcast apps to be unnecessarily confusing. Because I'm reasonably tech savvy, I generally chalk this up to design flaws rather than user stupidity, but I was honestly starting to wonder in the case of podcast apps, was there something inherently confusing about RSS feeds? So once I found Stitcher, I realized that it was possible to have a clean, straightforward interface that didn't bury controls and that gave me all of the options that I wanted. So first of all, let's just talk briefly about the virtue of podcasts. I grew up not watching much TV, but listening to a ton of talk radio, so I was a natural convert. In fact, before streaming podcasts became popular, I attempted to approximate them by and I'm going to date myself here, by downloading old episodes of This American Life and burning them to CD so that I could listen to them in my car and on runs. So thankfully, podcasts have made that process unnecessary because it was a huge pain in the butt and the CD had a tendency to skip while I was running. Now I listen to a wide variety of stuff, but right now I'm partial to podcasts with a political or a philosophical bent. So the biggest issue that I have with other podcast apps is around downloading. I don't have unlimited cellular data, so I'm really careful not to use a ton of data by downloading podcasts outside of Wi-Fi. Other podcast apps made this unnecessarily confusing and difficult. Inevitably, I would have no idea whether it actually downloaded or not, so then I would start listening to it and it would use up a bunch of cellular data. Or in order to find all of the downloaded episodes, I would have to go digging into each show just to see the downloaded episodes for that show. I found the whole thing confusing. But Stitcher makes this download info much clearer. Let me show you. First of all, they make it clear that there are three groups for podcasts, favorites, saved, and download. Favorites is all the podcasts or shows that you are following regularly. This list is for shows or podcasts, not for individual episodes. You can view either by shows or by episode. Favorites shows you the latest episode for all of your favorite shows. For example, Criminal is a show that I'm following, and the latest episode of Criminal is right here. So you can change the setting to show all episodes up here by hitting this gears icon. Saved episodes are episodes that you have tagged to listen to later. It doesn't download the episodes unless you change that setting. It just bookmarks it for later. The list is for individual episodes, not for whole podcasts. They do not need to be from one of your favorite shows. For example, Marc Maron's WTF podcast is not in my favorites list, but I want to listen to his interview with Greta Gerwig, so I saved it here. Downloads is a list of every episode that has been saved to your device, meaning that you won't use cellular data if you listen outside of Wi-Fi. I love that this is so clear and easy. There are two ways that episodes get here. One is that you can manually download an episode. For example, even though I saved this WTF episode, I didn't choose to download it, so let's download it now. Just scroll down and hit download episode. Now we're going to check back in downloads, and there it is at the top. So the second way that it can get here is automatically. I have chosen to download the most recent episode of every podcast in my favorites list. It updates in the background as long as I'm in Wi-Fi range. You can change all of these settings, and you can also set all of your saved podcasts to download as well under settings, general, download settings. This is great for me. For example, I love the daily podcast from the New York Times, and I love that I can listen to it every day in the car, even if I forget to manually download it before leaving the house. This is already so much better and more clear than I'm used to, but it gets even better. Stitcher has color-coded symbols to make everything super clear. Here's what they all mean. Blue means not downloaded, so these are going to stream if I play them. Green means that it has been downloaded. A solid color is unplayed, meaning that I haven't even started playing this one yet. White with a little bit of shade means that it is in the middle of playing, and entirely white means played or that I have finished playing it all together. You can also change the status of these by going in and hitting delete download episode, which changes it from green to blue, or hitting mark as played, which changes the icon to white. Watch what happens if I do that to this one. So clear. I have one other absolute requirement for a good podcast app, and that is the ability to sync. So I listen to my podcasts on both my iPhone and my iPad, and I want the app to keep my place and pick up on the new device where I left off on the old one. Stitcher does a great job of this. In addition, they sync favorites and saved, but they don't sync downloads. Most other podcast apps do this okay, but some are a little glitchy in the exchange. So Stitcher meets all of my requirements, but it also has some great nice-to-haves as well. I really like the ability to search. Would you believe that this is not a regular function in all podcast apps? At one point I was using one app, but it didn't have a good search ability, so I used another app for that. Stitcher has the best search ability. Go into search, and you can look not just for shows, but for specific episodes, and not just ones that you're following, but any podcast everywhere. So for example, if I search for Greta Gerwig, I get shows and episodes that reference her. You can also search within a show. So if I want to find the Keep It episode where they talked about Shania Twain, I can go to that show, pull down for a search bar, and search within the show. First screen. I like that you can determine which screen that you see when you open the app. I choose to see My Favorites podcast as my first screen, but by default it is set to go to my front page. You can change the setting by going up into settings, general, upon app launch, and then choosing whatever screen you want the app to start on. Manually sort. I always like the ability to sort things manually, and Stitch gives you this option and a bunch of others. So with shows, you can sort by name, by most recently updated, and manually. With episodes, they give you all of these options. Playback settings. So I like the control that Stitcher gives you over playback. If you go into settings, general, playback settings, you can control skipping behavior, whether playback goes from oldest to most recent or vice versa, the second increments for forward and back, and whether it plays automatically when it connects to Bluetooth. New playlist. Basically, favorites, saved episodes, and downloads are really just playlists, and Stitcher gives you the ability to create a new playlist. For example, I follow a couple of podcasts, but not as vigilantly as the ones that I follow in my favorites list. So I'm going to create a playlist that's called infrequent. Just scroll down, hit new playlist, and name it. Now when I go to add a podcast to a list, by hitting the plus sign, Stitcher gives me an option of adding it to my favorites or to this new playlist called infrequent, or I can choose to add it to both lists. But I can also change the download settings for that specific playlist to not download the most recent episodes, since I'm less likely to need them to update daily. So there's a bunch of stuff that I don't even use on Stitcher. I don't listen to their premium shows, which are only for paying customers, I don't use the browse much to find new things that I might like, and I don't use friends and profile to share things on social media. It does have some light advertising for free customers, but you can usually turn the ads off pretty quickly within the app. I don't find it nearly as annoying as Pandora's ads. So Stitcher gets my vote for favorite podcast app. Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated, and thanks for watching.