Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing SoundCloud 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 SoundCloud is ranked 6th. 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 Recommendations
Links to related music, based on what you're listening to, can be found in the sidebar.
Pro Subscribe to artists
You can subscribe to artists to be notified the instant they upload a new song or give an update.
Pro Explore tab has new music constantly
Explore tab on SoundCloud shows trending music that can be filtered based on genre/tag. There's a constant stream of new music.
Pro Follow people
You can follow people with similar tastes or that often find new music. When they favorite a song, SoundCloud will notify you about it.
Pro Free to use
You don't even have to log in or sign up for an account if you don't want to.
There are paid options for if you want to upload large quantities of audio (eg if you're a music label you'll need this), but it's free to download as much and as often as you like.
Pro Pre-releases
Some music labels, especially newer ones, release on SoundCloud before anywhere else.
Pro Creative Commons filter
SoundCloud allows for finding music that is licensed under Creative Commons.
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 Can't do an advanced search
You can't search, for example, for Creative Commons music with the tag #trap. It could be useful to search for music you like that is under Creative Commons.
Con Interface is full of bugs
The SoundCloud website has tons of problems, including issues with notifications, favorites, and uploading sounds.
Con Audio ads in some uploaded content
Some content on SoundCloud includes audio ads, particularly sponsored podcasts.
(Note that SoundCloud itself doesn't add these - all the audio you're hearing is exactly as it was uploaded.)
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).
