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[All Platforms] [Podcast] Individual Autoplay Settings

I think Podcasts should have different settings for autoplay than music. With music, the most desired way to listen is to proceed to the next song automatically without having to select one. But that's not the way podcasts are generally consumed - it is a more deliberate process. And particularly because the default sorting of a podcast is to display them with the most recent podcast first, it's quite a disruption to listen to a podcast all the way through and it begins to play the "next" episode - which also happens to be an older one that you've probably already listened to. There should be a setting that users can select to only play one podcast at a time. When the podcast is done, I want to manually select which episode of which podcast to listen to next, not have it chosen for me - and I would bet that's a pretty common listening pattern.

Updated on 2021-06-13

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Comments
Luke
Status changed to: Up for Votes

Updated on 2018-12-23

Marked as a new idea and edited the title slightly 🙂

Looukas

Agreed on this. Autoplay of the "next" episode—which is most likely the previous one you've already listened to—also makes it end up marked as listened through only 1 minute or so, instead of marked as fully completed, which then requires some redundant housekeeping.

DBjor

Yeah, I agree... in a way. For individual podcasts I'd probably want to have it this way but for the "unplayed episodes" list - which lists all the unplayed episodes from all of my subscribed podcasts I do want it to autoplay - if the "unplayed episodes" would be in reverse sort order (oldest episodes first and then autoplay the second oldest and so on) that is!! As it is now it's useless and I'm not using the podcasts feature in Spotify just because of this (I'm using Acast just because). Spotify: please look at Acast and how their solution around this works.

 

Of course an option to toggle autoplay or not would be most optimal in any of these cases.

Carapettigrew

ok yeah this. but my issue now is there is a sort function for unplayed episodes but because of autoplay I end up playing the first part of the next episode and it thinks I've already listened to that episode. I'd like to pick up where I've left off if I go listen to something else and come back without scrolling forever to find the last episode I was listening to because some podcasts have over two hundred episodes.

Pra713

I want to listen to an episode of podcast at night, and fall asleep listening to it. I don't want it to keep playing next episode. I don't want to wake up to my phone still playing the **bleep** podcast. This is a simple feature. Why can't the developer team just give us this option?

Zpotify2020

This one’s an easy fix: just use an app besides Spotify for podcasts. 

That’s what I ended up doing, since the alternative (letting Spotify continue to play podcasts all night after I went to sleep) would have driven me nuts. 

DBjor

Yes, that's what I had to do as well. I would want to use Spotify as my main Podcast app (as I have for my music) but as it is now I can't - it's just not built how I want to listen to Podcasts (... and the desktop app Podcast functionality sucks even more).

 

I'm using Acast right now which has a nice unplayed episodes feed (which can autoplay in the right chronological order!!) and it has different "sleep" settings for you who doesn't want it to autoplay forever.

toadslayer

This has more than 100 votes but I'm not seeing any update. It's very disconcerting to have it autoplay when autoplay has been turned off. Why wouldn't it already be a feature?

toadslayer

I have episodes downloaded and settings have "Download using cellular turned off". Spotify autoplayed a random episode from a show I follow. It's streaming it. Is there no data control for podcasts?

Deadlynomo

Spotify, you're really going to have to up your podcast game if you want people to use it here. Only reason I'm using for podcasts is because of LPOTL. Let's just hope the less than useful features don't turn me off listening to the podcast completely.