Apple quietly snapped up podcasting app Scout FM, which tries to make podcasting sound more like tuning into radio stations, for an undisclosed amount earlier this year.
Scout FM worked by letting users choose particular topics, then automatically customizing a radio station-like podcasting listening experience for them. It was intended as a way to cut through the findability clutter of hundreds of thousands of available podcasts.
This week on The CultCast: The brand-new iMac may look the same, but it’s so powerful that video editors are gleefully buying two or three at a time — we’ll tell you everything that’s new.
But look, forget buying the shiny new iMac, and put your money in Apple stock instead! I’m going all in on AAPL. Find out why I’m about to dump a huge cash stockpile into Apple stock, and the cash value of my current investments. We’re talking real numbers here, people.
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For most podcast listeners, there comes a time when you have way too many unplayed shows, taking up way too much space on your iPhone or iPad. Fortunately, this is a problem with an easy fix.
Take back precious storage space by deleting episodes you don’t need to have saved locally, and prevent the Podcasts app from hoarding content in the future. We’ll show you how.
Apple News Today, the breezy new podcast showcasing the day’s top news stories, sounds perfectly peppy and polished. Maybe too perfectly polished, in fact — you won’t find a single rough edge on this slickly produced daily news report, which Apple unleashed last week with iOS 13.6. You will endure no energized, partisan rants, either. These straight-down-the-middle reports won’t get your blood boiling while you make your morning coffee or tea. If you’re tired of partisanship, this is the antidote.
What you will find in the weekday audio show is steady promotion of the Apple News app, and of Apple News+, the company’s reportedly struggling subscription news service. This upbeat and earnest free daily news briefing basically functions as a Trojan horse for getting in the ears of potential Apple News+ subscribers.
If you’re starting a new podcast that you want to listen to from the very beginning, you’ll need to change some settings to ensure that the Podcasts app doesn’t automatically play the latest episode first.
It’s a simple tweak that takes just a minute, and we’ll walk you through it in this step-by-step guide.
The Apple Podcasts app is reportedly getting a facelift. The version debuting in iOS 14 will supposedly include a “For You” tab with suggestions based on podcasts the user is already subscribed to.
Even before the pandemic, podcasting showed that great content can come from anywhere, even your living room. So if you’re twiddling your thumbs, use them to press record and get your thoughts out to the world. This massive bundle of lessons will show you how to do it right.
This week on The CultCast: A tipster says the new 14-inch MacBook Pro is right around the corner! We’ll tell you what we know. Plus: Apple is readying its secret over-the-ear headphones, and a mysterious little product called the AirPods X. We discuss! And we wrap up with a USB-C charger that can charge it all, Logitech’s new StreamCam and a double-duty iPhone/Apple Watch stand in an all-new Under Review.
The nonstop onslaught of coronavirus news is making me a little crazy. Headlines asides, COVID-19-related content even infects the stream of shows in my Podcasts app. To ease my coronapanic, lately I’ve been binging on something a lot more relaxing: vintage radio podcasts from Relic Radio.
Served up through a variety of free podcasts, these old-time radio dramas really help take my mind off the rapidly unfolding COVID-19 horror show.
You’re stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, and maybe you’re spending lots of time keeping up with family and friends. But here’s an idea: Why not make a podcast? Not that you should stop actually talking to the people you like and love, but as a home project, making a podcast is a lot of fun.
And if you’re a musician, or you have kids, you can do a lot more than just monologuing into your iPhone’s mic. You can talk, add music, interview other family members, and anything else you can think of. Then, your friends and family will have a cool show to look forward to every day, or however often you publish.
This week on The CultCast: Forget the A12Z and LiDAR Scanner, it’s iPadOS and the new Magic Keyboard that just supercharged the iPad Pro — we discuss! Plus, we’ll tell you the best new features in iOS 13.4. And Tim Cook, aka The Cookie, uses Apple’s massive supply chain prowess to deliver hugely needed supplies for medical workers — we got the story for ya right here!
Our thanks to LinkedIn for supporting this episode. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. So head to LinkedIn.com/cultcast and get a $50 credit toward your first job post.
Google in recent days began rolling out a brand-new look for its Podcasts app on iOS for mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. The overhaul integrates a number of new features into a cleaner user interface that’s split into just three tabs.
The changes are designed to make using Google Podcasts easier and more enjoyable — and to bring it up to speed with rivals.
Apple is making it easier for Podcasts users to discover new shows focused on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The app’s new “Coronavirus: Stay Informed” section highlights content from the likes of CNN, NPR, BBC and ABC News.
If you sit in front of an iPad typing up Apple-related how-tos all day long, then working from home is no problem. In fact, it’s simply the next step up from “working from bed.” But for some professions, like musicians, working from home is difficult if not impossible. You might have a home studio, but you still need to get the band together to record them.
Or do you? ConnectionOpen is an app that lets musicians play together over the internet. The wild thing is, it’s a standard plugin for Logic, Ableton, Pro Tools and other audio-editing apps. And now, it’s also available for the iPad.
This week on The CultCast: iOS 14 leaks! We’ll run you through the best new features. Plus: Corona has hit the tech industry hard, and will mean delays for some of your most anticipated gadgets. Is Apple’s rumored March event canceled too? We’ll tell you what we know.
Spotify is reportedly making a big push to get record labels to pay to promote artists’ music in its service as a new way to generate revenue.
Despite having nearly double the number of paid subscribers as Apple Music, Spotify still isn’t a profitable company and is looking to the music industry to help it create new revenue streams. Although the talks are still ongoing, you could soon see sponsored songs in your playlists and other areas of the app.
This week on The CultCast: Apple’s first ARM-based Mac is headed our way — we’ll tell you what we know. Plus, Apple’s new AirTags tracking tiles will be unlike anything we’ve seen, and way more powerful than we thought. We discuss! And stay tuned — we’ll tell you the weird rule Apple makes big movies follow if they want to put iPhones or Macs on the silver screen.
Out thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Easily create a beautiful website all by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast, and use offer code CultCast at checkout for 10% off your first purchase.
Few of us know what it’s like to have our music played at an Apple keynote, but 37-year-old Apple fan Jonathan Mann does. Way back in the days of the iPhone 4, he composed a song about Apple’s Antennagate PR disaster. Not only did it get played at an Apple event, it actually made Steve Jobs dance.
For the past 11 years, Mann has recorded a new song every day, using his trusty Mac setup. That’s more than 4,000 songs in total. Now he’s launched a new podcast revealing his creative process. And, true to form, the latest episode features a song about the Mac Pro.
“My first computer, when I was just a toddler, was an Apple IIe,” Mann told Cult of Mac. “My mom used it for work, and my favorite activity was just to hold down different keys on the boot screen and watch the letters go and go.”
This week on The CultCast: According to a new report, Apple is prepping a new super-charged gaming Mac for WWDC! We discuss… Plus: full-screen TouchID will be replacing FaceID in a notch-less 2020 iPhone, at least according to a new rumor.
Our thanks to Linked In for supporting this episode. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters… head to LinkedIn.com/cultcast and get a $50 credit toward your first job post.
Podcasting and vlogging are the platforms of our age. So if you want to reach people, you want to be able to easily record high quality audio and video. Our iPhones already record pretty great video, but the little built-in mic struggles with quality audio. That’s where this compact condenser mic comes in.
Apple’s big update for Macs, macOS Catalina, is finally out today bringing with it a host of new features, apps, privacy improvements, and much more.
Developers just received the gold master version of macOS Catalina last week, but today’s launch was a bit of a surprise. Anyone that has a compatible Mac can grab the new update from the Mac App Store for free.
Pocket Casts, one of the best third-party podcast apps on iOS, is now available for free.
It won’t cost you anything to download the app anymore, and you’ll get to enjoy some of its best features — like cross-platform syncing and the dark theme — for absolutely nothing.
An optional Pocket Casts Plus subscription, priced at just $0.99 a month, gets you even more.
Each finished work of art has a backstory and Andrew Griswold’s podcast Just Outside the Artboard focuses on what happens between idea and creation.
His first episode, launched Aug. 23, gave him plenty to talk about as one of the 10 winners of Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” challenge.
Apple added full transcript search to its podcast directory in iOS 13. Even though you can’t actually read the podcast transcripts, this is still huge. You can search across the content of podcast episodes the way you can search websites with DuckDuckGo (or other search engines) today.
Overcast, the podcast app of choice for lovers of good design, powerful-yet-straightforward features, and the color orange, just added a brand-new recommendations feature.
Previously, Overcast used a Twitter-based recommendation engine. But developer Marco Arment says almost nobody used it. Now, he’s replaced it with recommendations based on users’ personal listening habits, and the result is amazing. I already added a few new podcast subscriptions based on its suggestions.