Uninterrupted playback in podcasts app?

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Level 1

106 points

Uninterrupted playback in podcasts app?

I have been listening to podcasts on long drives, via a playlist maintained in iTunes. Prior to OS 7and the dreaded podcasts app, this was simple: create the playlist in iTunes, sync it to my iPHone, plug phone in to car stereo and voila, uninterrupted listening for as many hours as I had synced podcasts.

With the podcasts app, I sync my phone and computer and soemtimes podcasts are on the phone and sometimes they are not. I go to my playlist, and if an episode was not downloaded to the device, the interruption stops the playlist playback, and then random music starts up as the stereo asks the phone to just play any darn thing. Then I either have to pull over or do some not so safe manipulations of the phone to skip the offending podcast and go to the next one on the playlist. This is not good.

How can I get uninterrupted playback of podcasts in the bleepity app? It's more important for safety to not interrupt them than have them in the same sequence as on the computer. I'd really like them to be played back by release date--oldest first.

Is there any way to do this in the app without utilizing the now mostly useless iTunes playlist I built?

iOS7.1, OSX 10.8.5, iTunes 11.1.5

iPhone 4, iOS 7.1

Posted on Mar 14, 2014 5:50 PM

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Answer 1

Donot Haveone Author

Level 1

106 points

Mar 16, 2014 11:05 PM in response to Donot Haveone

I have verified with Apple support that there is currently no way to do this--to set up a playlist, whether in iTunes or Podcast app, that will never stop because it somehow includes an undownloaded episode.

Feedback left with both iPhone and iPad, subject 'Podcasts' (since podcasts doesn't have its own feedback link).

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Answer 2

Donot Haveone Author

Level 1

106 points

Apr 30, 2014 6:50 PM in response to Donot Haveone

Not that it will surprise anyone here....today I had a nice long session with yet another new apple 'Senior advisor' about my podcast sync and playback issues--I've worked with at least 4 or 5 different people on the same case--and definitely no resolution. As I've ranted about before, iTunes plus Podcasts do a poor job of keeping episodes synced, create ghost tracks that screw up syncs, and turn what was a more or less functional radio-replacement into a real mess when I actually try to play podcasts back on computer and especially iOS devices. Since there is clearly no way to fix it by devising a better mousetrap-***-playlist, I have been focusing on syncing instead in these repeated sessions with Apple staff.

Today, with my advisor sharing my screen for several hours (off and on), I was able to install the app on my iPad, have a handful of episodes of a handful of podcasts copy over from computer to iPad, and then after playing one episode--only one of the 7--we managed to create a ghost track when the episode was correctly removed from the device, but still showed up in one of two playlists on the iPad.

One day, 7 episodes of two podcasts, a podcast-naive iOS device, about 5 or 6 syncs, and wemade a ghost of exactly the sort that has been screwing up my playback ever since the forced upgrade to iOS7. I made screenshots from the iPad and imported them into iPhoto so he could see that I was not making it up. He now has ammunition to send to the engineers, who must be aware of the incredible volume of complaints about this App, but who probably rarely get to witness such everyday problems so directly.

Fingers crossed they'll pay attention.

Meanwhile, Downcast is working great on the phone, but the problem is, of course, that it's on the phone only. Reviews of the Mac version and their own version of syncing via iCloud, which remains off limits to me, do not seem much better than those of the Podcasts app. Oh well.

Given Apple's push to everything cloud/streaming, and their new iTunes Radio, it's probably hopelessly luddite of me to expect anything better.

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