Android Tip: Managing podcasts using Google Listen and Reader

One of the best parts of moving to Android is getting away from iTunes. I have never been a fan of that software and it seems to be getting more and more bloated as time goes by. These days, all I need to do to move songs into my device is just connecting it via USB and dragging the songs into the mounted device.

There are things a few things I do miss about iTunes though. One of them is a subscribing to and managing podcasts. There are a few apps on the Android marketplace I guess but none seemed very good. Yesterday, though I gave Google Listen a try and I think its working out well.

Listen is an Android application released by Google Labs and as you can see from its homepage, it lets you find and subscribe to podcasts. However since it seems to be a fairly new project, the search index seems fairly small and I could only find a couple of podcasts that were interesting to me.

Whats interesting though is that Listen seems to use your Google Reader account to manage the subscriptions. So the podcasts that I had added to my account appeared under a folder named “Listen Subscriptions”. So just to test, I found the RSS feeds for a couple of subscriptions and added them into the same folder. Ta daaa! They immediately appeared in my “Listen” application on my Nexus One.

The coolest part is that the podcasts being managed by listen can actually be streamed to your device when you start listening to it, so no waiting for the download to complete and then sync to device before listening to em. Win!

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist.

6 thoughts on “Android Tip: Managing podcasts using Google Listen and Reader”

  1. Pingback: paradox1x

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: