started with free then started paying. the ads as said above aren't bad, just one little banner. but my main reason for buying was that you can upload audio files through the website and they show up in your app. so some academic lectures I had downloaded, I could listen to them in the app. used to be 9.99 but now 15. still worth it for me.
stock app can make playlists (stations they're called) but the main reason I went looking elsewhere was because stock podcast app never would stay in sync. see my post history and probably 25% are me commenting on MR just how broken podcast syncing was for me. no unplayed episodes then boom, thousands of them unplayed.
probably the two biggest things that I like are the custom settings per podcast and the speed adjust. I know that other apps have various sound enhance and audio speed etc. but the overcast one sounds good. can’t tell huge difference but I can a little, and the online folk get all techy about whatever Marco is doing to make it sound good. it cuts silence out of the talking and makes the speed variable. I always listen at 1.5. sometimes at 2. and a few sermon podcasts I can get up to 3x and still understand (somewhat older pastors who speak slowly and deliberately).
the other would be the custom settings. in one podcast I can have it always play at 3x, another podcast when it plays will be 2x, and if no custom setting it will resort to whatever I currently had set it at. so podcast with all diff speeds that once I set it never have to worry about it again. and, per podcast you can change the intro and outro skip. one show has the same long intro of 2 minutes. skips to the 2:00 mark automatically. NPR podcast all like to have around 30 second ad outros. they skip too. tinker with it once, and then your listening is so much better.
and finally, the priority playlist… sorta. during his last major update things went haywire for a while. this one feature is still somewhat broken for me but im hoping it'll get fixed soon. other bugs got fixed quickly. I have a playlists (custom) that sorts every show from oldest to newest (because some series shows wouldn't make sense listening from new to old). but what shows would benefit from hearing new first? news shows. so I have that playlists set to have all shows oldest to newest, but shows that I have marked as high priority (the news ones) get placed at the top of the list. so in theory it acts like old fashioned radio. my shows play, when a show ends it moves to the top and plays the next show. so if there is a new hourly podcast news flash (like NPR hourly 3 minute news) it'll play the news, then go back to playing whatever was next. closet to live radio I can get.
as you can see, the app is great in my opinion.
