Very Dated, Somethings Doesn’t Work

It works ok’ish.

The play list block looks horrendous, especially on mobile devices, Spotify player even Patreons is more appealing and theirs are really basic audio players. It’s extremely dated.

There’s this giant track image with a date on the mobile view, that’s it no waveforms nothing but the giant image with a date plastered on the bottom and an empty column on the right that looks like it’s missing something. The episode titles display in the editor, it doesn’t on the preview or live page, just the episode image, a red dot and the date and this is for all devices.

Theres no waveforms, no visual appeal at all. No mini player on the footer either so my audience can’t even easily skip or start a next episode. They must scroll back up to the top of the page to find the player controls.

Can’t disable downloads in the share button, can’t choose the channels where listeners can share the episode to.

Changing colors doesn’t stay changed, everytime lite speed cache purges the cache the custom colors of the player default to the original. The playlist block doesn’t follow the custom colors set in the settings anyways, just the single episode player —sometimes.

Can only generate 1 episode per post unlike sonaar that let’s you create a full podcast playlist. You have to use the nasty looking playlist block if you want some sort of a playlist.

The only things that are nice, is the ability to connect directly to Castro and have their publishing features inside wordpress.

The quality of sound is good. I remaster my episodes before uploading and the player doesn’t dim/reduce/suppress the audio quality, and bonus for the player having continuous play as long as the listeners stay on the page, it stops playing if your mobile device screen lock though and there’s no “continue where you left off” function, you have to start the episode over from scratch if you didn’t pay attention to the timestamps.

You can import your podcast from elsewhere or by using the rss feed. The iTunes ect integration is a nice touch. Though you need to download and install 2 separate plugins for transcripts and analytics, it would’ve been better if the features were part of the core plugin.

I used Sonaar, in my opinion it’s by far the best free podcast and music player with the pro version having dynamic ad insertion and previews of episodes, but it can’t connect to Castro directly which is what made me switch players. The lack of functionality and modern appeal though, is very noticeable. I just hope I don’t get more negative feedback from my audience otherwise I will have to decide what is more important.

Overall, it works and does what it’s supposed to. And it’s free. Please take it out of the stone age 🙏

• This topic was modified 2 days, 15 hours ago by bellakaroo.
• This topic was modified 2 days, 15 hours ago by bellakaroo.