Apple Podcasts 12+

I am a university professor who likes to read books or articles. I’ve hesitated to move to the podcast platforms, but I’ve done so out of necessity. Over the last few years I have found mainstream news to be very shallow in their reporting of current events. As a former devoted 6:00 news watcher, I have switched to the podcast platform to get in depth information that is reliable and based on facts instead of propaganda or lies.

There have been a few podcasts that I came across in my search and found to be “okay” but the Meidas+ stands out above and beyond my expectation! What I appreciate is that Ben is a former attorney who has trial experience. He knows how to research information and is able to understand the legal ramifications of what is happening in our current US political chaos. He is not afraid to state the facts and can do so with clarity. With everything that is going on in the world it is tough for me to make sense out of nonsense - and for Ben and his team, they do an amazing job of making sense of all the nonsense. I have found this podcast to be my favorite! I cannot recommend it enough. Well worth the switch from the “nightly news” format.

While I generally find the app to be clear and easy to use, there are some critical bugs with downloads. For serial shows which have to be played in order, while the podcast creator can designate that as the intended play order, the Podcasts app doesn’t recognize it for downloads. There is no option to download the “next” set of episodes, but there is a bug with the strings. When you switch to, for example, “download 3 most recent” and then go back, the string on the outer menu is “download next 3 episodes”. You can go in and out of the menu and it will change back and forth between “next” and “most recent”. In any case, whichever you choose, it just downloads the most recent. I’m on episode 3 of a story podcast that is marked as needing to be listened to in order, and download “next/most recent 3” downloads episodes 11-13. There is simply no way to get it to download 3-5, or even just 3. This is frustrating enough that I’m deducting 2 stars. There is another flaw that has caused me to remove another star. You cannot mark a podcast series as “played up to this point”. If I’ve listened to a series on another app and am hundreds of episodes in, I can’t switch over to this app and mark those first 200 as already played. I have to do every episode manually, which is infuriating if I, again, want to listen to episodes in order.

I used to use this app every single day to listen to hours of my backlog of my favorite podcasts, then Apple suddenly switched directions and completely removed the ability for users to load and store old episodes of podcasts and manage them as they like. I spent countless hours trying to find a hidden feature to do what used to simply be the natural function of the app, when it was built into iTunes, but to no avail. My huge library of podcast content was simply lost to me. It was first scrambled by the broken Podcast app for macOS, so I could no longer access the files directly, then this app failed to support playback of the files I did have.

Archives of older episodes are often very difficult to come by, as many providers truncate the older files, or creators switch services and don’t bring their older episodes over to the new service. My years-old collection was lost. I ended up scouring the Internet to gather up as many of the raw MP3 files as I could find, and am awaiting someone to give me a way to organize and listen to them. Finally, recently, I discovered that iMazing may be a solution to load podcasts directly into this app manually, but my first attempt got some into my library, then they disappeared after I synced my phone again.

I just don’t understand they need to remove a core functionality from one of their apps that is used by so many people. :(