I quite like to listen to podcasts. In fact, I probably get the majority of my news as well as a large part of my entertainment from podcasts. I listen to podcast at many places, mostly for stuff that otherwise does not take my full attention, such as cooking, walking somewhere or cleaning.
And just as there are more podcasts than air molecules around me1, there are also many podcast apps. I have been a big fan of Pocketcasts ever since I used the wonderful Pocket Weather app from the same makers2. Pocketcasts is outstanding.
Features
Pocketcasts has many excellent features and slowly more features, most of them good, are added every once in a while. But after all, it’s not that important to have new features, since podcast work fine, no need to improve on something that is already that good. But every once in a while, a new feature arrives. And recently, Pocketcasts started to support some first Podcasting 2.0 features.
And they have added support for a feature I’ve been waiting for a long time: chapters.
Chapters are awesome
The first podcast I remember that had chapters was the Digital Podcast by the swiss public broadcaster. It was really cool and helpful to be able to navigate through the podcast like that. Unfortunately, they stopped adding the chapters, but luckily the podcast is still good.
All in all, not many podcasts support chapters, but many should. And most importantly, one specific podcast should:
This American Life often has many stories throughout the hour. In fact, on their website already lists the chapters including the timestamps. And since you can access all episodes on the website anyway (and not in the podcast apps) I have built my own custom feed for This American Life anyway, so I might as well add the chapters as well.
So now I can listen to one of my favourite podcasts, including chapters. Which is very much awesome. Now, when I listen to this podcast, it looks like this:
Final word: RSS
I have a strong belief that a podcast should have an RSS feed. In fact, I will not listen to any podcast that is not part of the open podcast ecosystem.
Oh, actually all podcasts have RSS feeds, that’s how podcasts work. Otherwise it’s sparkling audio.
All images in this post are podcasts I listen to or have listened to before. Artwork is copyright of the respective owners. In my opinion, these podcasts are all worth listening to.
There might not be a citation for this, and I’m pretty sure it’s also wrong. ↩︎
Since then, Pocket Casts has been sold numerous times, first to several radio stations (and, perhaps more importantly, podcast producers). And now it is in the hands of Automattic which are, for the most part, known for being good stewards of cool apps as well as supporting open source as well. ↩︎