Review: Stitcher Podcast Streamer
So the PalmCast is up in its non-live form and you want to give it a listen on your Pre? If you're a homebrewer, there's a healthy chance you're headed to refresh drPodder. If you're not, you could sync with iTunes (assuming, of course, you haven't updated to the latest version :| ).
If the above don't work, you might check out Stitcher in the official App Catalog. It's a straight-forward podcast discovery and streaming app that I've been using for a week or so now with pretty good results.
More after the break!
The nice thing about Stitcher is that they don't stream the podcasts from their original source - rather they take them and re-compress them for better over-the-air performance (here's Stitcher's page for the PalmCast). The audio quality is not noticeably different - we're talking (ahem) spoken word here, so compression isn't a big deal. Unfortunately, the podcast takes a short amount of time to show up in Stitcher after it's been posted to feed.
The upshot is that Stitcher is able to start playing your podcasts nearly instantly, whereas other solutions make you wait for the buffer. Naturally, Stitcher also works great in the background.
Stitcher has a fairly complete listing of all the podcasts I care about - but you can't manually add one if it's not on the list. Compiling your list of 'favorites' is simple, too.
On the downside, Stitcher doesn't do a very good job of keeping your place when you quit the app and return -- which is to say it doesn't do it at all. Also, true podcast junkies will be disappointed to learn that Stitcher takes a 'radio' approach to podcasts. That means that *only* the most recent podcast is playable in Stitcher, you can't go back and listen to one that you've missed.
In all, Stitcher is nice for the casual podcast listener who wants to stream podcasts right away. I'm using both it and drPodder myself. drPodder for saved podcasts, Stitcher when I want a new show to start streaming right away.
