Audm 12+

Have been flirting with Audm for a while. Finally cracked and haven’t looked back. It’s great. I look at screens all day. I subscribe to magazines I don’t have time to read. But I do have time to listen. And sometimes podcasts + Audible + Hoopla just isn’t the thing. So get this, please: it’s cool. It’s also much cheaper than subscribing to all the content in print/online. And they probably need mass subscriptions to make it work at this price.

Small gripes: the readings are generally good to very good. But (so far, 2 weeks in) ALL the American-voiced articles pause for an unfathomably long time between paragraphs. In the often-long pieces this can be quite disruptive and, depending on your mood at the time, add up over 25+ mins to a an undertow of mild irritation or an overtow (is “overtow” a thing? It should be!) of madness-inducing rage. Ok, I exaggerate - but seriously, it gets in the way of an otherwise great listening experience. Your mileage may vary.

At first I thought this was just an unfortunate glitch to do with the fabulous, eerily accurate feature where the text scrolls with the audio in perfect sync. But, weirdly, English-English voices reading British-sourced articles don’t do this. They pause between paragraphs for a normal, helpful amount of time. So, Audm people, if you can fix this, I’ll give it six stars. You deserve it anyway! 🙏🏻

I originally downloaded this app to listen to some specific article fully intending to delete it after the free trial period because really who needs another subscription, especially when podcasts exist for free. But surprisingly I found that it’s well worth it - for one, subscriptions to all the different magazines audm pulls from would be way more than $9 a month. There’s a pretty steady stream of new articles available too. The narration is audiobook quality and for the narrators who read a bit too slow for my taste, the option to listen on 1.1x speed basically eliminates that issue without making it sound distorted or weird. I spend all day looking at a computer for work so it’s really nice to be able to listen to great journalism without having to spend more time sitting looking at a screen.

My only complaint is I wish they had some ways to filter articles by genre or content, like categories or tags for “film” “music” “opEds” “literary criticism” “tech” etc. For new subscribers there’s a significant back catalogue of articles and I’m sure there are interesting finds in there, but it’s difficult to navigate through them if you don’t either have a specific one in mind, or don’t want to scroll through every single one.

I have been using this app for nearly 2 years now and I have been enjoying it. There are still some longstanding pesky bugs and issues with the usability, but that's not what I'm here for. Since NYT acquired Audm, this app changed for the worse. Previously Audm mostly marketed itself as an app for verified longform articles, which were read by professional narrators. I liked it a lot. But since the acquisition, Audm is full of short NYT columns or op-eds which don't have much info. Sure, NYT has good articles too; but what NYT pushes to Audm are short columns that are mostly not very informational. And worse still, those short NYT columns are *read by the reporters*. Where have the professional narrators gone? Sure, some of the reporters have really good voices clear pronunciation, but the quality of the narration varies a lot depending on who reads it. Why all NYT articles should be read by the authors themselves? They are not professional narrators. Can Audm please come back to its old self, the app with verified good-quality longform articles, read by pro narrators?