Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Overcast 2.5

Marco Arment:

The new Uploads feature lets patrons upload DRM-free audio files for their own personal use (not publicly shared).

[…]

Tapping inactive episodes now adds them, rather than immediately playing them via streaming. (Tap again to play.) It’s a happy middle ground between the fast 1.0 interactions and the streaming capabilities in 2.0.

Great news. It sounds like you get 2 GB of storage for your own uploads.

Update (2016-03-16): Marco Arment:

Neither the $5-once IAP nor patronage-for-nothing were justifying much continued investment.

Patronage-with-perks is doing better so far.

6 Comments RSS · Twitter

This is so that you can stream phat audiobooks? I couldn't figure out the advantage for listening to your files in more than one place (that's really all pushing your own files to the cloud can do, other than the aforementioned streaming), but streaming so you're not cluttering your phone's limited memory makes some sense.

Still, very limited use case, right? I wouldn't even bother since I like paying very little for a limited data plan. Looks like Audible has been streaming since April last year. Strange. High data plan Librivox lovers who tip?

Seems pretty edgy for "practical, 99%er use cases only" Marco. ;^) Also seems to open yourself up to some degree of copyright liability. Strange.

@Ruffin I plan to use it to play random audio files that are not podcasts, e.g. conference videos. Previously there was no way to get these into Overcast without making your own private fauxcast. I would download them over Wi-Fi so there would be no bandwidth cost.

[…] the speaking styles of Rose and Ive, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to test Overcast’s new uploads feature, so that I could listen with Smart Speed. Unfortunately, it made far less of a […]

@Michael -- I was thinking those who want to listen to a file that fits on their device would just load in iTunes, and in your case, can't you just home stream them? But...

I saw in your post about the Ive interview that you'd hoped to Smart Speed the audio. That hadn't crossed my mind (duh), and could be useful/neat.

@Ruffin Doesn’t support loading in iTunes. Not sure what you mean by “home stream.” I wanted to listen to it in the car.

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