music app - podcasts iOS 7

Actually, I can listen to all my unheard podcasts through the "station", but it doesn't follow the same order as in the playlist. What happens is that if I have two episodes of podcast Z and one episode of podcast Y, the new app groups all the Z podcasts together, so if a Z podcast is at the top of the list, it plays all the Z podcasts before playing a Y podcast. I want to listen to them in the order than I downloaded them regardless of which podcast they are.

My work around is to create a station that only allows the latest of each podcast, and then puts them in order of downloading. This may force me to skip over some podcasts when I have more than one unheard episode, but if I get caught up on my latest podcasts, I assume that when I refresh the list, I should get the missed podcast back on the unheard list because most podcasts are deleted after I listen to them.

I'm also experimenting with some other podcast players.

Hugely dissapointing that Apple would remove this functionality. I hope they restore it, but between this, the low quality of the replacement Podcasts app, and the iTunes 11.1 podcast bugs, it seems they're no longer interested in podcasts in the iOS/iTunes ecosystem. Sadly, I'm beginning to wonder if iOS is still the best choice.

If your only problem is hating the Purple podcast eater, SoundHound app still works. itunes still syncs my smart podcast platlists to the iphone (well, as well as it ever has), and SoundHound can see them and play them in order. I know this doesn't fix the car problem, but for me, this was easier than changing them to audiobooks.

Agree hate the Podcast App totally, please please reinstate playing through music player

I had the same complaints with ios 6. My solution is to use a third party app to manage and organize my podcasts. I experimented with a few, and my favorite is Downcast, but there are others. It has everything you're looking for: syncing between devices, smart playlists, sleep timer, etc. And it is free. Therefore you don't need to mess with iTunes or the stupid Podcast app at all. Everything downloads and syncs semalessly between devices. The only potential problem for some users I suppose, although it isn't a problem for me, is that the app only works on iPhone and iPad, not on the Mac. I actually like this because I have a MBA with a small hard drive so getting several gigs worth of podcasts off of my harddrive was great. I highly recommend this "workaround" if you're frustrated with the Podcast app.

I was surprised to find that the same is true for my 2008 BMW 3-series. I'm pretty sure I tried this with iOS 6 and the podcast app there, and it didn't work, so I deleted the app and things got better. After I upgraded the phone to iOS 7, and got the complaint from iTunes saying it wouldn't sync podcasts without the Podcast app, I was very unhappy, and figured I'd have to downgrade, especially after I found this thread. However, I decided to try it first before I did that, and things seem to work; although podcasts don't show up in the Music app, they do show up via the menus in the car's audio interface.

Obviously this doesn't help if you want to use an app on the phone directly and don't like the Podcast app, but if the concern is just playing podcasts via a car interface, you might try it to see if it works for you, even if it hasn't in the past.

This is absolutely the worst "feature" of iOS 7. The Podcast App is terrible and slow and adds unecessary steps to something I could do easily before in the Music App. Also, like others, podcasts work less seamlessly with my car stereo than they did in the Music App in iOS 6.

Making this very simple functionality more difficult flies in the face of Apple's corporate identity of simplicity and user friendly devices.

Apple, please make podcasts an option in music again.

They did this same thing in iOS 6 and upset everyone. Obviously once people found a work around then, they hadn't succeeded in completely upsetting their customers that use this functionality. Like most people, I wouldn't have an issue with this if the stupid app would just work with my car's bluetooth connection. I work for a software company and the first time we forced a UI change on our customers, it took about a week for us to realize we made a huge mistake, and take changes like that very seriously now, always providing users with the ability to keep things "the old way". Then again, we pride ourselves on listening to our customers, where Apple's seems to know what's best for the greater good.

that's not true, it's NOT the same. you CANNOT synch podcasts from your mac, nor can you listen to them via your iphone until you DOWNLOAD THEM VIA THE APP, which takes FOR FREAKING EVER. So, no, it's not the same.

Just going to put some additional problems with thePodcasts app here:

no show notes available. when podcasts were in the Music app, my podcasts would have show notes indicating time markers and information for different segments of the show. now i have to just listen.

The fast forward and reverse simply do not work. If I miss something and want to hear it again, the reverse button takes me back minutes instead of seconds. Then, if i try to fast-forward, it goes for a few seconds and starts looping. When I stop the "fast-forward" it begins playing at the same spot I started from.

To top it all off, the play timer is just broken. My podcast will be playing and for example, show three minutes left. Twenty minutes later the 'cast is still going with 0:00 showing on the timer.

This app should not have been released, and it especially should not be the mandatory Apple- sourced means to listen to podcasts.

Again, I would encourage everyone to check out all the third party apps out there that are much better podcatchers. Downcast is my favorite. It has all the features you just complained about. If you're unhappy with Apple, go elsewhere! The fact that the podcast app by Apple sucked last year, and continues to be underdeveloped may be a sign from Apple that they simply don't care about this feature and they're hoping that third party apps will fill in the gap.

Done. I purchased Downcast last night. It's clear Apple has developed a complete disregard for it's customers.

I need to amend my statement slightly: downcast is not free but it is a very reasonable $1.99. I can't comment on whether it works with people's car stereo systems though...haven't owned a car in years.

Downcast seems good, but it's like all the other non-Music App players - my car doesn't know about it. Means I can manage playback manually, but not through the in-car controls. And unfortunately, there's something broken in ios7's Bluetooth audio connection which results in BT audio devices (such as headphones, and my add-on BT interface into my car's stereo), not responding to the player controls. I.e., I can't start and stop the podcasts via the BT device, I have to click the start/stop button on the iPhone's screen. This got better in ios7.0.2 but it's not really fixed yet, because it does stop working after a while. Apparently you can restart the phone to get it to work again - YAY!

Anyone taking bets on how long before Apple figures out that Audiobooks aren't Music either, creates the Audiobooks app and rips audiobook support out of the Music app? Audiobooks need to be equally hard to deal with so we can have a common user experience that makes sense in the new world order.

The biggest thing keeping me tied to my iPhone now is the other collections of apps that are working well for me. If I could easily switch the critical parts of my workflow over to Android I'd be heading that direction.