Android Music Player and Podcasts

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Coming from the iPhone I was expecting a similar music player experience on Android. The iPhone quite nicely allocates podcasts their own section within the music player and also provides great control over scrubbing.

Unfortunately Androids default music player doesn't even recognise podcasts. In the Android universe you have no choice but to use third party podcast players. Initially I was hoping to be able to get just a podcatcher that would download my podcasts so I could still play them in the default music player but that wasn't going to happen either.

It's all or nothing. You HAVE to use a third party podcatcher/player to handle podcasts and they all come with their own players built in. It's a very separate and "one program for one task" approach.

Fortunately there's a few really good podcast apps available. Google have their own Google Listen app that's a Google Labs project. I tried that for a while but found that it didn't queue downloads very well and if a download failed you were in trouble. I tried a hand full of others and eventually found that BeyondPod and DoggCatcher were the big two. BeyondPod is good but for me the interface is unnecessarily complicated and I've settled on DoggCatcher as my player of choice.

The huge upside to having a completely separate app to handle podcasts is that you're not tied to a computer that you have to sync with to get new episodes onto your phone. DoggCatcher updates all my feeds every hour and if/when I'm on wifi it'll download them. This all happens in the background without any interaction from me. So when I want to listen to something I just scroll through and see which new episodes have been downloaded.

I'm still hoping that Google's upcoming music service brings updates to the default media player, and if I could request one thing from DoggCatcher it'd be more control over scrubbing, but I'm happy enough for now.