ACast 3.1.30 released
Posted by acast on September 5, 2010
Features
- Tabbed user interface.
Bug fixes
- Minor bug fixes.
Other
- The user interface has been updated for simplicity and performance.
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ACast, a podcast player for Android
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The Paper Boy said
Liking the tabbedness. Took a little bit of finding to track down some of the menu options that used to be under the menu button, but all’s good now.
John C said
Thanks for this great app…
One question I had. I have a Droid Incredible and have been using the program flawlessly for the past 4-5 months. I recently updated to Froyo and also updated ACast, and for some reason, the player doesn’t remember my place in a podcast when I pause. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but it hasn’t helped. Is this a known issue?
acast said
Are you playing streamed or downloaded podcasts? I ran some tests and the bookmark functionality worked on my N1 with Froyo for both streamed and downloaded content. It do seems like the playlist view is not updated on pause though, i.e. the bookmarked icon is not displayed on pause, still the bookmark should be set for that episode and can be displayed with a refresh (Local…->Refresh). I’ll add fixing this on the todo list.
Can you try playing an episode with the playlist mini/bottom player, seeking to the middle of the episode and then press pause and then press play. Does this not resume the episode from where it was paused? If not it be great if you could run a log capture app like aLogcat after this occurs and then email me (ma_an@ter.nu) the output.
Justin said
Same issue for me. It never resumes playback no matter what you do. It’s so annoying that I just uninstalled the application. Hopefully this gets fixed and I’ll be able to use this app again.
acast said
Weird, haven’t really changed anything related to the bookmark functionality. Using ‘Player Type: External’ will prevent acast from storing bookmarks (the external player has to handle storing last position), but this does not seem to be the case for you and John.
What kind of device and Android version are you using?
Justin said
Ok so after playing with this some more it appears it may be a froyo issue. If you close the music player application it will lose your bookmark as soon as you press start the next time you open it. The only difference with acast is that it always loses the position even if the app is still running. I am using an HTC incredible with the newly released 2.2. Hope this helps.
John C said
Yes, I just tested Justin’s discovery (with the HTC Music Player) and am getting the same issues regarding bookmarking. That is to say, when I pause a music file with the included HTC player, it will resume where I left off. But if I close the music program, it will lose my place. With the ACast player, once I pause, it will immediately lose my place (whether I close the program or not). Not sure if the two issues are related, but both are definitely annoying.
Assuming there’s something buggy with Froyo on the HTC Incredible, is there anything you can do as far as ACast’s code?
acast said
Might be that the ‘seek to position’ for certain file types doesn’t work. If so, I wont be able to fix it.
When you play a podcast with the default HTC media player and move to another position with the seek bar, does that work (should require a seekTo)? Does that work with acast?
Is it different depending if you are streaming or playing downloaded content?
Does resume/bookmark/seek work for video? Streaming/downloaded?
John C said
Yes, I’m able to move to different position within a podcast in both the ACast player and the HTC Media Player. And I just tried a streaming podcast (something I don’t typically do), and that worked fine too.
I’ll email you another alogcat file for video. I don’t typically use the video function on ACast, so I may not have the settings right. I didn’t get any video, just audio. And while I was able to seek and streams would resume where they left off when paused, it seemed to go into a infinite loop (could be a completely unrelated issue) that forced me to shut down my phone to stop the stream and the loop.
Droid Incredible Froyo Problem? Pausing Audio? - Android Forums said
[…] […]
bg said
Hey ACast,
I’ve been using Google Listen for a month or so (it has less functionality than your app), and it seemingly has the same issue with restarting netcasts. Alot of the problems that are reported on their blog also started with froyo.
acast said
Thanks for letting me know!
Justin said
Any chance of a workaround for the seek to issue? I think some other applications have gotten around the issue by starting (play) the audio and then issuing the seekTo call.
John C said
Yes, would love it if a work-around for this issue could be implemented into future ACast releases!
Ty Unes said
I am having a problem with playing video in the app that I have not had before so I think it might be with this version only. When I tap on a downloaded video from the feeds tab and tap “play”, the player will launch but then states “Sorry, this video cannot be played.” So I tap OK, back to the feeds list. Then do it again, and the video will play. Sometimes I have to go through this 3 or more times but eventually, the video will play. I have tried both the “Big” player and using the “External” player with the same results. Eventually, I can get it to play but having to go through this routine several times is new. I would say it might have something to do with the resume issue posted here but this happens on a new (un-played) podcast as well. My hardware might have something to do with it as well.
Archos 5 Internet Tablet
Android 1.6 (fully updated firmware 2.0.38)
What do you think?
Javier said
Please correct the annoyong not detecting the correct size some audio podcasts.
Ryan said
I just started getting this same restart behavior after my last htc update last week. Htc evo.
Dennis Wright said
Am using Acast on a Samsung Galaxy S in the UK and it works really well, thank you.
If I might make a feature request, is there any chance we might get a playback speed control in a future version? This would be along the lines of the iPod feature where you can play back a podcast at say 1.5x normal speed without change in pitch. This is a godsend if, like me, you listen to loads of podcasts and struggle to get through them all. The human ear can take it all in at 1.5x or even 2x perfectly comfortably.
At the moment I use podshifter.com to generate speed-shifted versions of podcast RSS feeds and Acast works fine with those, but podshifter’s servers can sometimes take many hours after the original podcast release to produce the time shifted version. There is a new similar service called Taffy which will probably have the same issues. The Astro Player (one of your competitors) does support timeshifting but the overall product is not as good as yours.
I also came across the Osplay app which plays timeshifted mp3’s but lacks any kind of podcatching capability or the ability to integrate with another app that does.
acast said
A playback speed control feature will most likely not be implemented in acast until the Android media library gets support for it.
The issue is tracked here:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1961
Thanks
Dennis Wright said
The fact that Osplay and Astro player have this feature (and from a quick try-out of Osplay it works quite well) shows that it can be done. But presumably this was home grown code or they found some suitable DSP algorithm somewhere. Last time I looked at this sort of thing it involved Fast Fourier Transforms and getting decent quality in real time was quite hard.
Anyway, I can understand why you would rather wait for the functionality to be provided centrally from Google rather than cobble something together yourself. Maybe you might be in a position to help chivvy the Android team along a bit, because this is really important functionality for a lot of people.
If Android are focused elsewhere (podcasting functionality may not be their top priority) it may be worth doing something on your own because it is a feature in significant demand but in short supply, and it would be another major selling point for Acast.
acast said
Yep, I’d like to have it myself but i haven’t found an easy enough way of implementing it. Hopefully it will be provided with Android 3.0. I’ll see what I can do.
Grenky said
Please fix russ encoding.
Brendan said
I haven’t had any luck adding my own icons to feeds that don’t auto download their own. Is there some trick to it? I tried saving in the same format as the other icons, as a 24-bit, 60 x 60 .png file, with 96 dpi, but it still shows the default placeholder icon.
onskee said
I’m wondering if this app is still supported and/or being updated. Since some updates last week to my HTC Evo, several features no longer work properly. When a track is paused, unpausing it will not resume. Instead, it restarts. The same occurs with the removal of the headphones. It does pause, but restarts when I manually touch play. When an incoming call is answered, it also pauses, but restarts when the call ends. I’ve also noticed that sometimes (I cannot tell when/why), when a track has completed, it will restart, instead of ending and stopping.
I’ll be glad to share whatever settings you request.
An unrelated issue – which seems to have always occurred, albeit intermittently – is when I’m viewing the tracks to feed “A”, and I touch the Feeds tab to go to the feed list. I try changing to feed “B”, by touching it’s row item, it returns to the list of tracks to feed “A”. Usually repeating the process will land me in the correct list.
Thanks.
Brian Tao said
I just started using ACast to see if it would better handle queueing and downloading of my podcasts than Google Listen. Is it possible to specify update interval, number of downloaded items, expiry/deletion policy, etc. for each feed? For example, I have the global settings to check once a day, download the 5 newest items, and keep at most 25 items per feed, and delete after 1 month. However, for some feeds (e.g., CBC hourly news) I would like to check every hour, but only keep the most recent item. Is this possible?
Yuri Nazarov said
Hello, I love ACAST, but I have one problem. Searching for podcasts is often problematic – often the best match is returned way at the bottom, sometimes it is not found at all. I often have to add the RSS directly instead of using the search. Try looking for “MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olberman” or “White House Speeches Audio” and you will see what I mean.
Does anyone know why?
Thanks
Etienne Bernard said
Hi,
I’ve set up Acast to download some feeds that are really slow. Sometimes it just stops while it is still downloading. I’d like to know if it’s possible to configure Acast so that it can reget the files, without downloading everything again ? I’m using the paid version.
Thank you.
acast said
If possible acast will resume the download where it left off. It’s possible that the server that acast fetches the files from does not support resume. You should be able to test this with a browser, or other tool, by canceling the download and then trying to resume it with the client.
There is a bug in acast when the connection is interrupted, the downloads are canceled and the error message ‘Error: null’ is displayed. This might cause the file not to be resumed properly. I’m planning on having this fixed in the next release.
Let me know how it goes.
Thanks,
Etienne Bernard said
This is it, I’ve got the “Error: null” message. Nice to know you’re working on the problem. Keep up the good work ! 😉
acast said
This is fixed in 3.2.2. Thanks