Airshow: Lightweight Podcasts 17+

Airshow is a wonderful app that I hope to use as my podcast player for years to come. Previously, I have used Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts and Castro. Castro was my favorite among those, as I really liked its design and I the elegant simplicity of its inbox and queue system. That served me well until the app stopped working reliably due to lack of updates. Fortuitously, around the time I was starting to be frustrated by Castro, Airshow was released. I have been a happy Feedbin user for years, so I was excited to see a podcast app by its creator. It does not disappoint. Like Castro, it takes a simple approach to managing podcasts (yet provides flexibility with playlists if needed). You can either subscribe to a podcast and have new episodes automatically added to your queue, or you can “bookmark” a podcast and add individual episodes to your queue as you like. This system works very well for me. I also find the interface to be beautiful and logically organized.

While Airshow is working great for me so far, I would welcome the addition of customizable notifications for individual podcasts. I like to receive notifications when some of my favorite podcasts release new episodes. However, I also subscribe to an hourly news podcast and do not need notifications for each new episode. Other than that, it would be nice to be able to automatically skip intros and outros of podcasts too.

As Castro increasingly becomes unreliable, I was looking for a good alternative. Airshow seems to fit the bill pretty well. I really like how easy it is to set up your queue and that you can sort them into playlist. It’s a fairly intuitive system that doesn’t feel overwhelming.

That said, there are at least two features that I would love to see added. I would like to see the ability to add episodes to the bottom of the queue not just the top of the queue. it would be great to be able to adjust the skip speed so that instead of only being able to go backwards 15 seconds I could do 10 seconds instead. Down the road, it would also be great to be able to customize listening preferences for each podcast like setting the playback speed and being able to trim the silence.

This is an excellent idea to sync podcasts with a feed reader. The first version has been flawless so far and sounds great on both my iPhone and iPad. It does not have some of the fancy features that other podcast players have. But, the data model matches how I listen to podcasts. There is a queue of episodes and that’s it. I pick what is automatically added to the queue and everything else get’s added when I want to listen. Simple.

I imagine that Feedbin will roll out additional features in the future, but the current version works great for me.