bherrmann7 / car-cast

Car Cast is a simple Android podcast downloader and player. Optimized for use in a daily commute, it features big buttons, large text, remembers last played location. FOR MORE INFO ---> http://jadn.com/cc/

Car Cast is a simple Android podcast downloader and player. Optimized for use in a daily commute.

History

Car Cast was created when Android was first released. The project was a learning exercise to understand the Android APIs. Car Cast peaked with around 100k installs, but after about 5 years it has mostly been in maintenance mode. There are a large variety of other podcast applications to choose from, so Car Cast is no longer actively developed.

Features

• large buttons (typical for automotive use)
• large text
• remembers last played location
• typically uses offline downloads

FOR MORE INFO ---> http://jadn.com/cc/

If you make an improvement, please send along a pull request.

The license on Car-Cast is the MIT license. See COPYING and http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

HAVE FUN!

car-cast's Issues

share button

be awesome if I could share my recordings with others so that I wouldn't have to txt it out, like a share button.

We need some tests

Info here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/testing/testing_android.html

Car-Cast simply aborts a download sometimes

If a network connection goes away, Car-cast will just abort a download in progress. This needs to retry or restart or at least notify users about what went wrong.

preference: dont use lightbulb notification of audio recordings

The recording portion may have been overlooked, I've used it to record important conversations but now theres a lightbulb always in my top bar telling me that I have recordings. The only way to get rid of it is to Force Stop the app in settings.

Audio Recorder layout sucky

Uses absolute positioning which looks terrible on my Samsung Vibrant

more description

Like the program. It would be nice if the descriptions in the list of podcasts was more than one line. Many of the podcasts have similar titles.

Deleting a podcast can cause metadata mismatch

Deleting a podcast (while playing, I think) caused the wrong podcast to show as playing on the podcast list, and also when returning to the player page.

sleep timer function

we get a request for this about once a month.....

AlarmHost issues

if CarCast starts and alarm is set, but no service.... bitch and star the alarm host

This is a workaround for the problem of the alarm host getting killed... typically by task killers.

Version number

Only nerds care about the version number, move it to the Settings page.

"delete all previous" did a "delete All"

[Alfred writes] On my Nexus One, while playing a podcast decided to delete all previous podcasts. I touch held the previous podcast to the one that was playing,
and selected Delete Previous. CarCast crashed. When I came back to it, all podcasts were gone.

Add delete button to player

add delete button to player.

Download Progress counter acting strange

Thanks for a very useful piece of software that I enjoy using a lot.

While downloading some podcasts a counter is shown on the download page like this:

142341k/103443k

Sometimes the first part of of the counter goes further that the last part. I take that must be a programming mistake that can easily be corrected. According to my understanding the first number should reach the second number and then start downloading the next episode. This is purely a cosmetic problem since the podcasts are downloaded error free.

All the best from
Copenhagen

Downloading should retry 3 times per podcast

• Downloading should retry to download three times per podcast
• perhaps downloading should have a pause / resume button....

Deleting a podcast during downloads causes CC to force-close

During a two-podcast download, the first podcast completed downloading, and CC started on the second. Since I didn't want to listen to the first podcast, I went to the podcast list, to delete the file. The force-close dialog immediately came up. When CC came back, downloads had been aborted and the first file was still on the filesystem.

Nightly download

Nightly download (with configurable time - default 2am) with an adjustable cap (default 50) of podcasts which cause it to not fetch anymore.

When you delete podcasts, CarCast forgets where it currently is (if playing)

Today I was listening to a podcast. I pressed "Menu" and chose "Podcasts." I had some podcasts that I had already listened to so I pressed "Menu" and pressed "Delete Listened To." The podcast I was listening to stopped playing and when I returned to the playing screen it had been reset to 0:00.

This is an example of the situation we have discussed previously where Car Cast doesn't maintain the current location of a playing podcasts.

Could Car Cast automatically retain the current location of playing podcasts before leaving the playing screen? Like pressing "Pause" does?

Ben Moore
http://benmoore.info

Save progress every 30

seems on gingerbread we occasionally top playing, for unknown reasons.... CarCast seems to completely loose it's place. To make this even sligly less painful, we should save our location about every 30 seconds.

Preference to keep display on

Preference to say dont sleep when android is running.

Have to hit back button too many times

Sometimes, often as a result of selecting the "downloads complete" notification, Car-cast will present 3 or 4 screens as I press "back". This sometimes depends upon which CC screen I was on. For example: Alert -> player -> download status -> player -> home.

When jadn.com is down, Car Cast is poorly behaved

I can't pull down podcasts (doesn't even get to the scanning stage,
always showing 0/0) unless I uncheck Data Collection in settings.

Is something wrong with jadn.com's web service? I wonder if we should drop
that on a thread or something so as not to block users when something
like this happens.

selective history erase

In the next update can there be a way to selectively delete from the podcast download history? For example when a download is incomplete? Notify [email protected] when completed

podcasts are truncated

I frequently find podcasts are truncated if the data connection is anything less than 100% stable. To complete the download the process has to restart again from the beginning. With an edge dialup connection this takes time and burns battery life. Would it be possible to add an option when starting each download session to resume partially completed downloads? Richard - HTC desire S

Save button hard to find

when adding a subscription the save button is hard to find when the screen is oriented....

Probably a "done" button should be on the keyboard so that the keyboard can be dismissed - or a scroll bar should appear showing that there is more stuff to do on this page...

add warning to "Erase download history"

I clicked the button to "Erase download history." It's in the same place as "Download podcasts" is on the primary menu screen. Please put a confirmation on that too!

[email protected]

next/prev podcast size cache seems busted.

I will take a look into that. Car Cast is supposed to "cache" the size/length of the file, sounds like it's failing to do that and trying to size it when doing next/prev. I will investigate.

Thanks
-bob

On 12/20/2010 06:07 PM, Phil Buonomo wrote:

Thanks once again for this excellent app. I wanted to let you know it sometimes get locked up while skipping forward and backward. This may be because
the file size of the podcast I download reports a different download size than the file actually is.

Player won't pick up metadata from manually downloaded podcasts

If I manually download some podcasts or mp3s and place them in the carcast/podcasts directory, Car-Cast will play them, but will not find their metadata like title or feed. I think it does read total length, though.

Removing Headphone Jack does not necessarily set bookmark

This might be a duplicate of Bug #8, but recently I haven't been able to reliably resume playback from the same spot after pulling the headphone jack out.

This may or may not be related to installing a new ROM (if there's some way to test, I'd be happy to do so).

My symptoms:

1. Play a podcast.
2. Pull the headphone jack
3. Playback stops, but the currently playing podcast resumes at either the most previous bookmark or the beginning of the podcast.

Thanks for all your work!

Download progess sometimes shows a partial download even though the whole podcast comes down.

I've had times when the graphical progress bar seems to indicate only 30% or so of the podcast downloads, but when I check it, it is there in its entirety.

per subscription downloding

Per subscription downloading... add a menu item on the subscription screen to allow for downloading of just that subscription...

Tell, Robert Liles [email protected] when implemented.

-bob

Foreground mode

Hi,

thanks for carcast, I'm using it everyday.
Is there a reason why you don't use the android foreground mode? I have a Mot Milestone (Droid) which is a bit underpowered and if there is a lot happening on the device (navigation + general sync) sometimes CC gets stuttery or gets killed. There is the "Foreground mode" for apps in Android to improve scheduling for the app and avoid getting killed, specifically for things like music players.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html#startForeground%28int,%20android.app.Notification%29

Andreas.

Add Delete Listened To

Add "Delete Listened To" to podcasts screen

Nightly delete of listened to podcasts

If "Nightly auto delete listened to" is checked, then delete listened to podcasts at nightly download time.

Change feedback email address

I edited the googlegroup settings, it now accepts thirdparty emails, so change the CarCast feedback to [email protected]

Microphone gets giant on tablet

The "Microphone" shouldnt grow huge on tablets

Player progress bar can sometimes drift from real time

Player progress bar can sometimes drift from real time, or the max time is not calculated correctly. In either case, I've seen the player go about 2 minutes past maximum. When I manually dragged the slider to near the end, the bar showed normal behavior, ie when actual time met max time, the podcast was over. Thus, I think there is some drift in effect rather than a miscalc.

When downloading and network is lost... confusion happens.

I believe if you are downloading two podcasts, say A and B

If A is downloaded fine, then while B is downloading the network is lost (or if you press abort) - even though A was correctly downloaded - it seems to not be available. worse it wont be downloaded on the next try. A seems to be lost forever (I think it is in the download history, but for some reason the file doesnt seem to be in the filesystem.)

This could use some investigating.

No Download Details on Tribe

When downloading podcasts, the Details button is below the fold, and once again, the screen won't scroll.

Download specific podcast from subscription list...

I would like to, from my subscription list i could click to select a pcast from that sub.

adding a podcast

• should ignore double "http://http://" when entering a podcast (happens on cut/paste)
• if no http:// prefix is entered, it should just add one (instead of giving a java error.)

New feature, Volume memory

Would it be possible to have a "volume override" option that, if set,
would put automatically the media volume to a desired level when
starting Carcast?

Podcast Sorting

[email protected] would like it if we sorted podcasts alphabetically.

Perhaps a page off the Podcasts screen which lets you tinker with sort options

Review if debug mode is needed on release builds.

Carcast has "android:debuggable=true" in the manifest, even on release builds. Apparently this is not needed anymore and may slow down the device. Please see the answers on this stackoverflow page:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4580595/what-would-happen-if-android-app-is-released-with-debuggable-on

Fix shitty "Add" button on Add Subscription screen

Alfred writes, Tried subscribing to Boagworld. Was able to copy and paste feed URL. Test was successful. But the subscribe button has been pushed off the bottom of the screen, and it won't scroll. (The Tribe has a resistive touch screen with dimensions 240 x 320.)

Loss of SD card access confuses car-cast

After mounting the SDCard to a computer, CC won't read the podcasts directory until after a download session completes.

The "per subscription default when upgrading" isnt global

I downloaded the latest update and got the per subscription download feature. Seems to work so far.
The only oddity was that the default setting for all subs was unlimited, although it should have been global. After the upgrade, I suddenly got over 100 podcasts.

Sometimes player forgets my bookmark

I don't know what triggers it (perhaps listening through the end of a podcast or end of the whole list?) but there are times when the player seems to pick a random time to resume playing as I next and prev through things.

Often, this time is 00:43 seconds. Not sure why.

Feature Request: View show notes

It would be useful to view show notes. For example, cchits.net (my own site) has relevant information for the podcast in the RSS feeds (http://cchits.net/daily/rss)

Test issue

This is a test.

Subscription and/or Podcast List changes cause loss of place

If you delete a subscription or a podcast from the list, your place in the list is lost (because car cast rebuilds the entire list view instead of just marking the data dirty)

I'm working on a fix, should be out later today.