Listen to or download this episode of Living Blindfully (00:54:48)
In this special edition of Mosen At Large, I want to introduce you to the new podcast app in my life.
For years, I’ve been a happy user of Overcast, but a podcast app for iOS named Castro Podcast Player kept being mentioned by people who consume a lot of podcasts. Some time ago, I checked it out and found significant accessibility issues for blind people like me who use the VoiceOver screen reader built into iOS. That’s no longer the case, and it’s by far the best iOS podcast app I’ve ever come across.
Key features include:
- Easily import your podcasts from many other third-party apps.
- By default, all your podcast episodes are placed in an email-like inbox, so it’s easy to see what new content you have and get to the stuff you want to hear.
- Exclude certain podcasts from your Inbox while staying subscribed.
- Features Overcast listeners have come to love, like compressing pauses and improving speech quality.
- The best chapter support in any podcast app I’ve used, including the ability to deselect certain chapters to skip the parts of episodes that don’t interest you.
- Copy any audio file into a special folder on your computer and it appears in Castro.
- Convert video to audio and play it from your podcast app.
- A raft of Siri shortcuts.
- Many more really slick features.
Castro is free but it’s quite limited in the free state. To unlock its full potential, you’ll need to make an in-app purchase but there is a free trial, so it costs you nothing to give it a try.