How does Play Later work? Why do you say it's better than a traditional download button?
Anytime an episode grabs your interest, we suggest you add it to your Play Later list. It's a convenient way to build up an offline-ready playlist and also serves as a kind of bookmarking capability. While Player FM has a traditional download action ("Download Now") for the sake of familiarity, we would advise most users to use Play Later instead, for the following reasons:
- Play Later cleans itself up so you don't have to. Episodes are automatically removed from the list when you play them and only a fixed number of Play Later items are ever downloaded (default 10). So when new episodes are downloaded, the old ones are deleted. This lets you relax and never worry about running out of space or having to clean up every few weeks.
- You're in control of downloading conditions. A traditional download button will always download immediately, even if you're on 3G/4G and running out of battery. Play Later only downloads when you're on wi-fi and you may also configure to only download while charging. Or if you want the traditional download button experience, you can make it always download immediately.
- Play Later episodes sync across devices and the web. So you can hit Play Later on your work PC and it will be on your phone when you leave the office, ready to play offline. That's a more cloud-friendly approach to the traditional downloading model.
- Play Later also serves as a playlist of your favorite discoveries, with the ability to sort and re-order them anytime.
In case you want to keep an episode on your device permanently, you can use the "Download Now" action (since Play Later auto-deletes from the device as it gets full). But aside from that, there's really no good reason to use it.