Listening Well

Choosing an app

There are many apps for listening to podcasts, and finding one that suits you is best done by testing, because the features that are important to one person are less important to another.

Searching

If you want to find podcasts on a particular topic, or featuring a good speaker, the app that is best for listening may not be the best for finding the podcast.

Listennotes and Podcast Addict are good for searching, and allow you to identify the url of the podcast, which can then be copied to another app for downloading.

Downloading

All apps let you download episodes for listening to later when you may be off-line. Sometimes you may want to keep an episode – then it is useful to have it saved with a meaningful file name. Antennapod gives downloaded files names that allow easy identification later, but other apps are not so helpful.  For example, Antennapod downloads a file with the name ‘Brian Swimme The Cosmos Watching Itself E35’, whereas Podcast Addict calls it  ‘2019 Brian Swimme_pe_12590’. However, Podcast Addict does allow you to change the format of the file name in ‘Settings’.  I have the download saved here.

Podcrastination

There are so many podcasts available, you can spend all your time listening to them. It is important to find time to meditate on the wisdom within some of them.