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Add to SafariWhen comparing Spotify vs Overcast, the Slant community recommends Overcast for most people. In the question“What are the best podcast apps for iOS?” Overcast is ranked 2nd while Spotify is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Overcast is:
For listening to talk shows, Smart Speed allows you to skip silences and pauses. Voice Boost is very helpful when the speakers vary from really quiet to really loud - it balances the whole thing out. And you enable them during playback, so neither will mess up music podcasts.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Huge collection of music and fast access to newly released songs
Spotify has over 20 million songs and arguably the largest collection out of its competitors and usually has the fastest access to new music.
The Spotify desktop client allows local music files to be imported with the option of syncing with a mobile device which largely mitigates the issue of missing artists.
Pro Related artists
Helps to find new authors based on your previous picks
Pro Curated playlists
Public playlists on Spotify created by other people are great for finding new music.
Pro Client's functionality can be extended via third-party apps
Spotify desktop client allows for third-party apps. They extend the functionality of Spotify and many of them offer new ways of discovering music. Noteworthy apps include Moodagent, Last.fm, Swarm.fm, ShareMyPlaylists, The Hype Machine, We Are Hunted, Shuffler.fm.
Pro Has a free version
A free, ad-supported account allows streaming from an extensive library of music.
Pro Weekly Discover playlist uses a great algorithm
A playlist generated by Spotify based on your listening habits and released every Monday. The algorithm used by this playlist is great and stands out from its competitors.
Pro Smart Speed and Voice Boost
For listening to talk shows, Smart Speed allows you to skip silences and pauses. Voice Boost is very helpful when the speakers vary from really quiet to really loud - it balances the whole thing out. And you enable them during playback, so neither will mess up music podcasts.
Pro Voice Boost
Boosts and normalizes volume.
Pro Very good audio quality
It has the best sounding audio when sped up. It also has neat features like the "Voice Boost" setting being tuned for being played when the phone is set flat on a table.
Pro Feed redirection
Sometimes podcasts change their hosts/urls. Overcast will handle and remember this.
Pro Easy playlists
Simple UI for making playlists of podcasts.
Pro Podcast specific settings
Speed, voice boost, smart speed, notifications, download/stream new episodes.
Pro Chapters navigation
Supports several Features for a great #UX to navigate Podcasts Episodes with chapter marks. Even shows a visual timeline for each chapter.
Pro Timestamp sharing
Links to episodes can be combined with timestamps for easy sharing (links the timestamp to the web app).
Pro Good catalogue
Pretty much the same as the other options, but nicer categories and list views.
Pro Ability to add podcast from URL
RSS or whatever else will work.
Pro Themes
Light, Dark (dark blue), Black.
Pro OPML import/export support
Pro Twitter integration
Recommendations within the app are surfaced to your followers.
Cons
Con Free account have lots of ads
If you hate commercials, you would buy Premium or go on using something else.
Con Discovery is terrible
The discovery algorithm is poor and does not learn fast enough. Not obvious how to train it.
Con Poor audio quality
There's a high range of bitrates and most of vary from average to bad.
Con The ability to discover new or relevant podcasts ("Recommended for you") is practically useless
Similarly, the search feature seems to only look for podcast hosts or podcast names. You can't find all podcasts that has a specific guest.
Con Very barebones webapp
Con Unplayed episodes
Does not have the ability to show unplayed episodes for individual podcasts.
Con Adds a subscription even after listening a single episode
It is not possible to pick a single Podcast Episode to download without having to subscribe to yet another Podcast feed (that shows up in your Subscriptions List).
Con Can't set a subscription to NOT download any episodes
By subscribing to a podcast you have to set it to download at least one (most recent) episode. There is the setting to set the podcast to stream only, but would prefer to set to zero downloads and choose which episodes to download individually.
Con Unable to sort by playtime
It would be nice to have the ability to sort tracks like podcasts from the shortest to the longest.
Con No paged RSS feeds
this Podcatcher does not support reading longer RSS Feeds that are split into several pages (for faster access).
