I find myself listening to a lot of podcasts again, new shows seem to keep creeping into my regular rotation, slowly but surely I feel it spinning out of control. My biggest problem with podcasts is that I never have enough time to listen to everything I want to listen to. One thing that does help with this though is Smart Speed in my favorite podcast client, Overcast.
Overcast is a great app for podcasts; it is well made, and has a lot of great audio settings. The audio settings are probably the clients biggest strength, Smart Speed alone makes the app worth it. You can tell there is great care taken with all of the audio features. When you turn Smart Speed on it reduces gaps of silence and speeds up pauses in ways that you can hardly tell. You can choose to speed up the podcasts even more if you would like to, but that will speed up the way things sound, Smart Speed doesn’t do that. In the apps settings it shows you how much time Smart Speed has saved you beyond any other speed changes, for me this total is 31 hours. I have saved almost a day and a half all thanks to Smart Speed, crazy. The layout of the app is simple and intuitive, its well designed and takes out the stuff you don’t really need. There is also a good recommendations section that I skim through way more often then I need too. You can even see recommendations from Twitter in there as well. I also enjoy that it downloads all the podcasts on to my phone and doesn’t just stream them.
The app is free to download and it offers a one time in-app purchase to unlock all of the features. While the in-app purchase is $4.99 and may seem like a lot, I think that the 31 hours I have saved is probably worth a one time five dollar fee. While there are many good podcast clients out there, Overcast is my favorite and it even lives in my dock.
