Castamatic Podcast Player

I’ve been hunting for the “perfect” podcast app and, imho, this comes the closest of anything on the market. It has pretty much everything you’d want in terms of sound boost, silence trimming, timed skipping of intros/outros, customizable global defaults w/the ability to save custom settings for each show, and no real ads – just a minimally invasive banner in the episode list promoting the premium version. The only (minor) quibble that I have is that the playback speed setting changes in 0.25x increments; a bit more granularity would be appreciated. Yes, you can subscribe for ten bucks a year to support the dev, but all the above features are available for free. Give it a shot, it’s an excellent app.

I love this app. It has all the podcasting 2.0 features and uses native components which looks and feels very polished. There is one downside, when playing on Bluetooth in the car, if you turn off the car while playing a podcast (without pausing it beforehand) there is a chance that the app will get confused and loose your place. Next time the app starts up the podcast starts from the beginning! If this can be fixed the app would be perfect! Update: thank you for for the developer response! Unfortunately I am still having this issue, I had it on my old car stereo system and still have this issue on the new one which is CarPlay enabled. Let me know if there is any way I can send detailed debug data somehow to help track this down.

Castamatic has all of the features one would expect from a modern podcast player, presented in a very well organized, easy-to-use interface. The user experience is brilliant compared to many other players which have become almost hopelessly convoluted. When I discovered that sideloaded files also synced across devices, Castamatic even replaced my audiobook app. The app subscription model is something I’m still getting used to, especially since multiple subscriptions add up very quickly, and Castamatic is certainly on the higher end for an app with no obvious services or storage being provided. That being said, as long as Castamatic is under continuous development the current asking price is reasonable. My personal wishlist for Castamatic would be ‘End of Chapter’ and ‘End of Episode’ options for the sleep timer, as well as a time-based limit for News Mode, as opposed to episode count.