Talk radio is horrible. By large, the medium has devolved into stale fart jokes by aging morning zookeepers political discourse aimed at rural survivalists. Thankfully, podcasts allow us to hpick the talk programming that we want to hear. Smartphone apps are the perfect medium to manage your podcast library take it with you—anywhere your ears go, your favorite podcasts can follow.

Recently, I profiled the best podcatching apps for Android. To be sure, any of the eight apps featured there will be good enough. However, after spending some time with each app, cket Casts ($4) has proven to be the best podcatcher for your Android device.

Style is substance

cket Casts’ flat design clutter-free navigation allows for an intuitive user experience. l your favorite podcasts are stored in one easy-to-peruse magazine-style library (as you can see to the left). One nit-pick: There is no “list view” layout option in the initial window (I’m a fan of list views), but once you click a podcast icon, the app will present you with a list view of available episodes.

Tap on an individual episode to prompt a pop-up with a brief episode description the option to stream or download. (The app charitably has an auto-delete function that will delete episodes after they’ve been played—the lack of an auto-cleanup in other apps has caused me grief in the past.)

Once inside an episode, you can readily skip around on the timeline or simply push a button to skip ahead 30 seconds if you’re bored, or backpedal 10 seconds if you missed something. Easy.

The app boasts a simple discovery function to find new podcasts by network, genre, or picks. Additionally, it’s simple to find subscribe to the podcasts you already knew you liked.

aylists are for playas

aylists are a must-have for long car rides or those times in your life when you want to remain hs-free over a long period of time. Creating managing playlists in cket Casts’ minimalist interface is a simple endeavor.

You can add episodes to manually curated playlists with a simple tap. Additionally, you can create “smart playlists” that will automatically separate podcasts into a group (such as sports, comedy, tech, so on), which you can download/stream manually on a per-episode basis. ternately, you can set it up to auto-download as episodes become available (wisely, cket Casts has included an option to only auto-download when connected to -Fi).

rsonally, I’m not a big consumer of video podcasts (except for ’s own ay This! Techtch, of course), but cket Casts seemed to hle video content just fine allowed for the same navigation playlist management as my audio podcasts.

If there was one thing missing from cket Casts, it would be a lack of a b interface. The best apps anticipate that we travel between multiple screens throughout the day. I would love the ability to explore new podcasts, manage playlists, or download episodes directly from a website have it sync with my phone. To be fair, few podcatchers offer this functionality with the exception of the no-longer-supported sten, which would sync with a folder in the moribund Reader.

Many consumers have a mental block against paying for apps, which is unfortunate as it encourages better software. Yes, there are plenty of free podcatching options out there, but for my four dollars, the ability to interact with a quality ( ad-free) app that you will literally spend hours with is well worth the investment.