Audm

Have been flirting with Audm for a while. Finally cracked and haven’t looked back. It’s great. I look at screens all day. I subscribe to magazines I don’t have time to read. But I do have time to listen. And sometimes podcasts + Audible + Hoopla just isn’t the thing. So get this, please: it’s cool. It’s also much cheaper than subscribing to all the content in print/online. And they probably need mass subscriptions to make it work at this price. Small gripes: the readings are generally good to very good. But (so far, 2 weeks in) ALL the American-voiced articles pause for an unfathomably long time between paragraphs. In the often-long pieces this can be quite disruptive and, depending on your mood at the time, add up over 25+ mins to a an undertow of mild irritation or an overtow (is “overtow” a thing? It should be!) of madness-inducing rage. Ok, I exaggerate - but seriously, it gets in the way of an otherwise great listening experience. Your mileage may vary. At first I thought this was just an unfortunate glitch to do with the fabulous, eerily accurate feature where the text scrolls with the audio in perfect sync. But, weirdly, English-English voices reading British-sourced articles don’t do this. They pause between paragraphs for a normal, helpful amount of time. So, Audm people, if you can fix this, I’ll give it six stars. You deserve it anyway! 🙏🏻

Disregard my earlier review — the developer got back to me and I was just wrong. They *do* provide the full description from the publisher; you just need to tap on the description field to see it. My bad! Thanks for the excellent service and for getting back to me, Listen In Audio, Inc. Excellent app, I love the idea as well as the content. This is something I’ve been thinking of, myself, for years and they have executed the concept beautifully. However, I just can’t understand why the user isn’t able to see the full synopses of the articles prior to listening. You see a small sub-headline in the “Discover” feed, but when you click on the article it just launches right into the content so that you don’t really know the entire concept of the article before you start it. I’ve had to search the titles of the articles online to try to find synopses, because otherwise I’m never sure whether I’m actually interested in what the article is about. Short descriptions (could be the ones written by the original publication, doesn’t need to be complicated) would go a long way in improving the usability of this app.

If you like both the Longread format and podcasts, this is a great app to check out. Audm manages to get really interesting longread content (in a variety of lengths from 15 minutes to well over an hour, sometimes in multi-part serial articles) in a huge variety of topics. I like episodic podcasts also but sometimes on my runs or at the gym, I want to plug into something different and have the ability to curate a really interesting listening queue. I’ve listened to tracks on crime, politics, science, health, pop culture, and some totally random stuff that is so compelling. Some major publications with great credibility. You won’t be disappointed by the content or the audio quality. Over the 18 months I’ve been a subscriber they have made major improvements to the interface and quality. If I ever have a technical issue the dev team responds rapidly - a rarity with apps today. I’ve recommended Audm to several friends so far and they’ve signed up. The bottom line .... I don’t go for my long distance runs or short plane rides without it :)

There is so much amazing journalism out there—and some of the best journalism appears in long form magazine articles. It’s just so hard to find the time or to subscribe to every magazine. Here is the solution — the best, most recent long form pieces performed by professional narrators. Who could ask for more? And yet, Audm gives you more, because in addition to being able to listen, you can quickly and easily transition to reading the articles. Better yet, once you subscribe you have access to the entire catalog of articles dating back years — all from top publications. So, if there’s a topic in the news you want to learn more about, just search within the app and you’re bound to find great, in-depth reporting on that content. It is easily my favorite app in years. Give it a try. You won’t be disappointed!

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As the title of this review indicates, I think the developers of Audm had a great idea. Sadly, it has not been implemented very effectively. From a purely technical point of view the user interface is a bit clumsy. The way in which articles are selected, queued, and played could be a lot cleaner. More annoying is the app’s propensity to crash. For example, as I am writing this (the last day of October 2019), the app nearly always crashes when scrolling through the list of available periodicals. I could perhaps live with these technical shortcomings, but far more troublesome are the content issues, viz., the lack of good articles from which to select. Given the lengthy list of periodicals the app touts, the developer would have prospective users think that there is a vast, vast number of quality articles from which to chose. But that’s not really the case. To cite just one example, the last article available from “The New York Review of Books”, a semi-monthly publication, was two and a half months prior to the writing of this app review.