I’ll look into what it would take to add custom files. They would probably just be treated like downloads as far as the UI is concerned.
Would a good e-reader/audiobook player be a better solution? I’m a reader myself and have considered building a good library tracker. I could see it including e-books and audiobooks as well as the library tracker.
right now I currently use Koreader as my primary reader app. Keeping them separate is nice. My home layout does have Koreader renamed to “Library” though so I guess they can fit under the same umbrella?
Thanks for this update, @davidray . It really is much appreciated.
Now that CalmCast allows for adding custom RSS feeds, I have finally installed it and given it a whirl; I immediately noticed a feature that I am surprised to find missing.
Importing custom RSS feeds for paid podcasts was a breeze, and they all loaded successfully (and at lightning speed)! However, I see no way of marking even a single episode as having already been played—let alone selecting multiple or all episodes and marking them as played. I find this to be a bit irksome, seeing as I currently have 2,423 episodes across multiple podcasts that have already been listened to outside of this particular app. Do you plan on adding a mark as played functionality and some sort of episode selection functionality?
Additionally, it would be extremely helpful (and arguably necessary) to add a filtering functionality that could hide already played episodes. Without it, I’m stuck having to scroll endlessly to locate old episodes that I haven’t yet listened to.
I installed the latest version and uninstalled the old one beforehand. So now everything is fresh 
All the podcasts have been added again and the episodes that are important to me have been downloaded. Everything is working really well, except for one thing. I still have the problem that sometimes the playback window is not displayed, but the episode is playing in the background. I then have to search for the episode in the download list, click on it, and only then does the playback window reappear. Since the latest version, I now have this problem whenever I switch to the SMS app or another app and then back to the CalmCast app. The playback window disappears again and cannot be brought back up using the maximize icon. This icon does not exist.
That’s definitely frustrating. I will do my best to reproduce this before I release the next version and see if I can have a fix out. My assumption is simply that the UI is losing sync with the player. This should be an easy fix if I can reproduce it but I’ll still try to get a more concrete state management in place either way.
I hadn’t planned on adding too many more features to this app. My goal when setting out was keeping this as useful but mindful as possible. I’ll think on these changes though and see how they fit in my plans.
Thank you for your quick response. I hope you find the bug. Otherwise, this app is really perfect and I love it. I use it every day! I also think that it has enough features as it is now. Any more features and it would be too cluttered and no longer fit the “Mudita concept.”
I truly understand the desire to refrain from overloading these Mudita apps with unnecessary features! However, I fail to see how the “Mudita concept” should mean that I cannot possibly use the app to actually listen to my podcasts. In literally every other podcast application I have ever used, the options to mark episodes as having already been played and to filter visible episodes by played/unplayed status have existed. These two features are quite necessary for most regular podcast listeners.
For example, one of the several podcasts I listen to regularly has been releasing three episodes per week for the past ten years. That’s over 1,500 episodes so far, and I’ve only listened to the most recent 700 or so. With the current iteration of CalmCast, I have to scroll through approximately 700 already played episodes just to find the next unplayed episode for me to listen to—and that number of episodes I’ll have to scroll through will just keep increasing.
In any other podcast app, this isn’t an issue whatsoever simply because the abilities to mark episodes as having been played and to filter episodes by play status are always present. Unfortunately, the lack of these two functions within CalmCast is so disastrously limiting that I am forced to use literally any other podcast app despite the fact that no other podcast app is designed to function well with Mudita phones.
One request I have for a future update would be: pressing the lock icon on the play screen also hides the other options (speed, sleep timer, etc)
The only issue I have run into is sometimes episodes say they are downloaded, but not available to play offline. I assume that means the download got interrupted.
I’ve got a new update out that addresses a few of the things you mentioned. If you use MindApps, I’ve published the update there (I’m not sure what the propagation time is for that) and it’s also available for direct download on Github. You can view Github for the release notes:
My latest update has changes to active media tracking so that re-entering the app should hopefully not lose your now playing controls. Please let me know if you continue to see this issue. I’m not able to reproduce the issue personally so I’ll rely on the community for this.
Thank you very much for this quick update. The Mudita developers could really learn a thing or two from this 
I’ve now tested it a few times. I ran Calmcast in the background, wrote text messages, took notes, and brought CalmCast back to the foreground. It worked perfectly 5 out of 6 times. The 6th time, the playback window wasn’t there, but I was able to bring it back using the maximize icon. I’ll continue to test it extensively.
Thanks for your efforts
Hi! You’ve done a great job with the app! You’ve even got me, who doesn’t listen to many podcasts, to start listening more, haha.
However, I’m experiencing something strange. I downloaded CalmCast via Obtainium, and when I see the app among my downloaded apps, it says that version 1.0 is installed, along with an icon indicating that there’s a new version available to download. When I tap on the app to get more details, it also states that version 1.0 is installed but that the latest version is before 1.0 (in this case, 0.6.0).
When I try to update the app by clicking on the icon, I’m not sure if the app is updating or not, and the icon for the new version available does not disappear. Does anyone know what the problem could be? How do other users update CalmCast?
Hey, thanks for reaching out! This was one in a long line or rookie mistakes from me when I started the app…
Because I launched the app initially with the internal tag of 1.0, my beta releases of 0.x.x are not registered as “updates.”
I will, however, be launching a true “1.0” today as version 1.1.0 that should trigger updates across any stores that the app is registered in.
Okay! Now I understand. Looking forward to the next update.
Well done, once again.
@denguefeber I just pushed version 1.1.0. I haven’t used Obtainium yet so I’m not sure how long it takes for them to register the new version.
This should also now trigger the update in MindApps for anyone using that. This is the only “store” I will be manually registering my apps in, btw. I think it is a good middle ground for app installs on a minimal device. Obviously, being on Github, apps like Obtainium will continue to pull the app without my input so that’s always an option for users.
So I continued testing it all day. It definitely works better than before, but there are still some issues.
I took some screenshots:
This is how it should look when I listen to a podcast, and this is how the app should display it when I quickly write a text message or do something else, but the podcast continues to play in the background and I then bring CalmCast back to the foreground, which usually works:
This is what it sometimes looks like when I reopen CalmCast, which isn’t a problem either, because, as marked, the icons are there so I can maximize the playback window again:
And after I paused the podcast earlier and left the Kompakt lying around for a while, or wrote a few text messages in between (in between, I kept checking whether the playback window was still there when I opened the app, which was usually the case), it suddenly looked like this and I had to search for the episode I had started and click on it again to play it:
Very insightful. Thanks for the diligence.
It seems like the app is being “killed” in the background, probably to conserve ram/battery. When this happens and you relaunch the app, if the audio is still playing, my controls pick that up and rebuild the player. If the audio is not playing it doesn’t have anything to build the player on.
The more logical thing here is probably for me to manage a state snapshot when the app is killed so I can reopen to that state. I’ll look into that.
Works like a charm!
