Best Podcast App - Stitcher Tutorial

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my favorite podcast app -- Stitcher, why I like it better than the others that I’ve tried, and I'll take you through all of the features that I love the best. 

I have been on the hunt for the best podcast app for years now.  Stitcher is the 4th one I’ve tried and I like it the best by far.  In case you are interested, the others that I tested out were the indigenous Apple Podcast app, iCatcher, and Overcast.  Stitcher has a premium service, which involves content, but I just use the free app.  

For whatever reason, I have found podcast apps to be unnecessarily confusing. Because I’m reasonably tech savvy, I generally chalk this up to design flaws (rather than user stupidity), but I was honestly starting to wonder in the case of podcast apps. Was there something inherently confusing about RSS feeds?  Once I found Stitcher, I realized that it was possible to have a clean, straightforward interface that didn’t bury controls and gave me all of the options I wanted. 

First off, let’s talk briefly about the virtue of podcasts. I grew up not watching much TV, but listening to a ton of talk radio, so I was a natural convert. In fact, before streaming podcasts became popular, I attempted to approximate them by (and I’m going to date myself here) downloading old episodes of This American Life and burning them to CD so that i could listen to them in the car and on runs.  Thankfully — podcasts have made that process unnecessary because it was a huge pain in the butt and the CD had a tendency to skip while I was running.  Now, I listen to a wide variety of stuff, but right now I'm partial to podcasts with a political or philosophical bent.

Download or Stream

The biggest issue that I have with other podcast apps is around downloading. I don’t have unlimited cellular data, so I’m really careful not to use a ton of data by downloading podcasts outside of WiFi. Other podcasts apps made this unnecessarily confusing and difficult.  Inevitably, I would have no idea whether it had actually downloaded so then I would start listening and it would use up cellular data. Or in order to find my downloaded episodes, I would have to go dig into each show to see the downloads for just that show.  I found the whole thing confusing, but Stitcher makes this download info much clearer.  Let me show you. 

First of all, they make it clear that there are 3 groups for podcasts: favorites, saved, and downloads.

• Favorites - is all of the podcasts or shows that you are following regularly.  This list is for shows or podcasts, not individual episodes.  You can view either by Shows or by Episode.  Episodes shows you the latest episode for each of your favorite shows.  For example, Criminal is a show I’m following and the latest episode of Criminal is this top one here.  You can change the setting to show all episodes up here by hitting the gears icon.  
• Saved Episodes - are episodes (not shows) that you have tagged to listen to later.  It doesn't download the episode unless you change this setting.  It just bookmarks it for later.  This list is for individual episodes, not for whole podcasts.  They do not need to be from one of your favorite shows. For example, Marc Maron’s WTF podcast isn't in my favorites list, but I want to listen to his interview with Greta Gerwig, so I saved it here.
• Downloads - is a list of every episode that has been saved to your device.  Meaning that you won’t use cellular data if you listen to outside of WiFi.  I LOVE that this is so clear and easy.  There are 2 ways that episodes get here. One is that you can manually download an episode. For example, even though I saved this WTF episode, I didn’t choose to download it. So, let’s download it now. Just scroll down and hit Download Episode. Now we’ll check back in Downloads and there it is at the top.  The second way that it can get here is automatically.  I have chosen to download the most recent episode of every podcast in my favorites.  It updates in the background as long as I’m in WiFi range.  You can change all of these settings AND also set all of your saved podcasts to download as well under Settings, General, Download Settings.  This is great for me. For example, I love the Daily podcast from the New York Times and love that I can listen to it every day in the car — even if I forgot to manually download it before leaving the house. 

So this is already SO much more clear than I’m used to. But it gets even better.  Stitcher has color-coded symbols to make everything super clear.  Here’s what they all mean:

• Blue = not downloaded - so these will stream if I play them
• Green = downloaded to my device
• Solid color = unplayed, meaning I haven't started playing this one yet
• White with some shade = I have started playing
• Entirely white = finished playing or played

You can also change the status of these by going in and hitting Delete Downloaded Episode (which changes green to blue) or hitting Mark As Played (which turns the icon to white).  Watch what happens, if I do that to this one.  So clear. I have one other absolute requirement for a good podcast app and that is ability to

Sync

I listen to podcasts on both my iPhone and my iPad. I want the app to keep my place and pick up on the new device where I left off on the old one. Stitcher does a great job of this. In addition, they sync favorites and saved (?), but not downloads.  Most other podcasts apps do this okay, but some are a little glitchy in the exchange. 

Stitcher meets all of my requirements, but it also has some great nice to haves as well. I really like the ability to

• Search - would you believe that this is not a regular function in all podcasts apps?  At one point I was using one app, but it didn’t have a good search ability, so used another for that. Stitcher has the best search ability.  Go into Search and you can look for not just shows, but specific episodes. For example, if I search for Greta Gerwig, I get shows and episodes that reference her.  You can also search within a show. So if I want to find the Keep It episode when they talked about Shania Twain, I can go to that favorite show, pull down for a search bar and search.  
• First Screen - I like that you can determine which screen you see when you open the app.  I choose see My Favorite podcasts as my first screen, but by default it is set to go to My Front Page.  Change this by going into Settings, General, Upon App Launch and then choosing the screen you want the app to start on.
• Manually Sort - I always like the ability to sort manually.  Stitch gives you this option and a bunch of others.   With shows, you can sort by name, most recently updated, and manually.  With episodes, they give you all of these options.
• Playback Settings - I like the control that Stitcher gives you over playback.  If you go to Settings, General, Playback Settings, you can control skipping behavior, whether playback goes from oldest to most recent or vice versa, the second increments for forward and back, and whether it plays automatically when it connects to Bluetooth.
• New Playlist - Basically, Favorites, Saved Episodes, and Downloads are just playlists.  Stitcher gives you the ability to create a new Playlist.  For example, I follow a couple of podcasts, but not as vigilantly as the ones in my Favorites list.  I'm going to create a playlist called Infrequent.  Just scroll down and hit New Playlist and name it.  Now, when I go to add a podcast to a list, Stitcher gives me an option of adding it to my Favorites OR to this new playlist called Infrequent OR I can choose to add it to both lists.  Then I can also change the download settings for that specific playlist to NOT download the most recent episodes since I'm less likely to need them to update daily.

There is a bunch of stuff that I don't even use on Stitcher: I don't listen to their Premium shows which are only for paying customers, I don't use Browse much to find new things that I might like, and I don't use Friends and Profile to share on social media.  It does have some light advertising for free customers, but you can usually turn the ads off quickly from the app.  I don't find it nearly as annoying as Pandora's ads.  So Stitcher gets my vote for favorite podcast app.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!