Rosemary Orchard (11:08)
Yeah, I can tell you a bit about Overcast Maker, because I do use Overcast. And it's one of these things that with the pandemic, my podcast listening changed significantly. But the app of choice has not changed for me, and that app of choice is overcast. Now, there is a caveat to Overcast that I do need to mention. It is audio podcasts only. It does not do video. So if you're looking at the screen here, then you'll see it says iOS today, and then in brackets audio. Because I have subscribed to the audio feed of iOS today because those episodes are of course, audio files. So they're a bit smaller than the video files. And it doesn't need to do all the magic with it just to turn it back into audio when Twitter is great and provides an audio file for me anyway. So I can see here I have my current episodes, which is the latest episode of iOS today, because I haven't had a chance to listen to last week's episode yet, but I can toggle over to all, and then I could scroll back and see and go back to listening to our episode about Safari extensions if I wanted to. Now, there are per podcast settings which can Be really, really useful. So you can say, hey, I do want to follow all the new episodes of this podcast. Or maybe you've just downloaded an episode of a podcast, perhaps because a friend recommended it to you or something, but you don't actually want to follow all the new episodes yet. So you can toggle that off if you want to. You can also pin it up to the top of your podcast list, keeping it front and center, because of course you're gonna be doing that for all of the Twitch shows. Um, and then you can get really nitty gritty nerdy with things if you want, so you can say, hey. So this podcast, maybe, for example, it's a podcast, one that I listened to. I did struggle a little bit with it because of the audio quality. The Isdal Woman, which was recorded by the BBC, which is storytelling true crime about the Isdal woman, a woman who was found in Iceland. And I'm not gonna tell you any more than that because it's a little bit gruesome. But either way, you could say, no, I want oldest first, newest last, because those are more like a story. However, for something that's news based, like the Verge podcast, you might well say, hey, newest, oldest. And you can also do things like adjust your episode limits. So if it is news based. So for example, maybe you listen to an actual, like news news podcast, like a breaking news podcast, or a daily news summary, you probably only want, like today's summary. Having a summary from 10 days ago, that's not hugely helpful. So you can say, hey, I want to keep every episode of this podcast ever. I want 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10 episodes, and it's entirely up to you. Now, some podcasts have a little musical intro at the beginning, which is fabulous, and I personally love that. If you don't like, because you only listen to that podcast in like a block and it gets a little repetitive with the intro and the outro, you can adjust your intro and outro to skip, say, 35 seconds, and you can adjust this by five seconds at a time. And same with the outro. So it'll just skip the first block of time and the last block of time that match those. Those timestamps. So that is, you know, some of the nitty gritty of overcast. Now it does have even more within the podcast playing. So you can adjust the podcast playback speed. And I can say, hey, this podcast people talk really, really slowly. And this drives me a little crazy. And I can crank this speed up to three times. That's. That's as Far as it goes. Now, my default is 1.2 times speed. But on top of that, Overcast has this thing called Smart Speed. So Smart Speed is if there's a really long pause somewhere, it will basically grab that and shrink it down and just not entirely remove it. So you won't have all the words stuck together, but it will shrink it down and just trim all of the gaps in the audio, allowing you to listen faster but without, you know, sometimes it gets really high pitched or really low pitched because they're messing with the speed. That doesn't happen in Overcast, but when you use Smart Speed, it gets rid of the sizes. There's also a feature called Voice Boost, which can, especially with something like the InStyle woman, try to pick up on the voices and improve the quality of the audio. Now, I personally feel that this is something that the production side of people should be doing, which is why we've got the wonderful people in Twitch Studio, or, you know, Twittigital Studio as it is now, who are doing all this work to make this better. And they're getting rid of all those weird background noises and everything for us. But not every podcast has that. Not every podcast has got the budget for it, or even the technical know how, or they just don't realize that there's a wind blasting in the background, making it really difficult to hear what people are saying. So you can turn on Voice Boost, um, and you can also specify that these settings are custom for this podcast. Um, and so now I can say, hey, I'm going to increase this to 1.3. But this is only going to affect this podcast. It doesn't affect any other podcast. The other options at the bottom are where the audio is going, is it playing to, for example, the AirPods Max on my head, which I'm using for podcasting. So I will not be selecting that. My living room speakers on various other AirPods or HomePods and so on. And then there's also a sleep timer, because who doesn't like Sleep Timer? Now, you can hack a sleep timer into any audio app, and that's with the clock app and the alarm you can have. Or a timer, sorry, the timer sound can be set to sleep audio and that will just pause any audio after that period of time. You can also say, hey, I want to stop after this episode and just, yeah, when this episode's done, just stop playing. Now, the final feature I want to mention about Overcast, because there's so much I could talk about. But I'm just going to mention this one is excellent. Exporting and sharing clips. So I can share a link to a particular podcast at a specific timestamp. So if I were to just fast forward this a little bit, there we go to 157, then I can share a link to the current time, which will then open this podcast online, overcast fm, and link to that explicit time that the podcast is being is at in my podcast player. So if I said to my, if I want to say to Micah, hey, have you heard this? I can link Micah to that specific moment of something happening in a podcast instead of expecting him to sit there and listen to a 2 and a half hour extravaganza and figure out which bit I was referring to in that. Um, I can also just share a link to the podcast episode. Um, I can export the audio file or I can share a clip. And so that clip will start shortly before where I currently am and I can just adjust that if I want to. And so I can say, hey, you know, I want to start this at like 1:32 and I'm just gonna scroll across and yeah, up to about there. That's perfect. Now I can specify this audio. I could do it as a portrait video, landscape video or square video. And these are designed for sticking on Instagram or something, but of course you could put them on any social media site you like. And I just think it's really lovely that you can share these little or in few choose not so little clip of, you know, audio for a podcast. If somebody's made a really great point, why not share it and you know, share a little bit of imagery about that podcast as well.