Should be able to perfom operations on all podcasts grouped under a category
Should also be able to group podcast's by category and perform operations on all podcasts in the category from the category directly e.g. reset podcast, update podcasts, download unread, etc.
Next version will allow you to select if you want to filter episodes list screen by podcast (like it is right now) or by category. If you select the later, then you can easily select the episodes for a specific category to apply an action like download, mark played, add to playlist, …
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Kane Casolari commented
When I first started using categories, I was hoping the settings could be applied per-category. For example, set all podcasts in the "News" category to keep only the *newest* one or two episodes, but set all podcasts in another category to download the *oldest* 5 (or whatever) episodes; set the news ones to play at 1.5x, but the "Comedy" category to play at 1x, etc., without having to change that for each podcast individually. Ideally, every setting that is currently available for each podcast would also be able to be applied at the category level, except the ones that only make sense to apply to a specific podcast (like changing the name or URL). Basically, the categories should act as another level of default settings, in between the app-wide settings and the individual podcast settings.
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Magne Røyset commented
Yes. I'd like to set automatic update and download rules for categories. I have some podcasts I follow closely and want to automatically download episodes and add them to my playlist. But there are ~60 of these, and manually setting all the automation settings for each one is tedious to say the least. If I could add them to the same category instead and simply have the category settings dictate rules for downloads, I'd save hundreds of taps.
Alternatively, have some sort of system that lets you save presets for settings that can be easily applied to several podcasts with only a few clicks.
As Cyprien points out, a general improvement of the categories system can make organizing podcasts much smoother and more powerful.
Some podcasts I want to get downloaded ASAP after a new episode releases, and ideally the feed would be updated every hour. Other podcasts are in hiatus or dead and only need sporadic feed updates. If I have many retired podcasts they would slow down the updates of the important podcasts. However I still want them to update automatically so that I get notified if they return. Currently there is no way to have different update schedules, but with powerful categories it would be a walk in the park for users to set up a custom update schedule for different sets of podcasts.Category automation could also be handy. If I set the Soccer category to automatically apply the Sports category as well, I can have both broad and fine grained categories available without needing to add every single broad category to every podcast. If I categorize a History podcast it should also be automatically end up in the Educational category etc.
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Cyprien D commented
There are many requests concerning categories here, because categories are underused. Categories should have at least these functions added to them:
- Some categories (for instance, podcasts that are constantly renewed and old episodes are removed) require that all their episodes are automatically downloaded. For other categories, you can afford to only download the oldest unread podcast, because they are always there.
- Allow filtering by category, not only one, but for instance feeds that belong to these two categories or feeds that belong to this category but not the other or all the podcast channels except some particular category/ies.
- Allow filtering by category and by categroy groups (as described previously) in views like "New episodes", "Recent episodes", "Downloaded episodes", "Favourite episodes", "Playback history", "Play in progress" or "All". You can filter some by podcast channel, but why not by cagegory or category definition?
- Maybe a different update frequency (some feeds update twice per day, whereas others barely update every month).
- Also, make an automatic category by language. "English", "French", etc. PA already knows their language, so why not use this information?