Recently support for podcasts on TuneIn in the car had gotten better. The ability to have different playback speeds (even though I don't actually use that myself), and much better support for picking up where you left off, even if you switch to a different audio source, have been welcome improvements (I won't say enhancements, because those should have been features available on day one). Yes, there would be the occasional glitch, but all in all I felt like TuneIn support in the car was actually usable and I could finally start using TuneIn in the car rather than streaming my podcasts from my phone. And then along came 2021.4.12 (I think) and even 4.15, which I thought might fix things but only made them worse! It is now worse than it's ever been! How on earth can Tesla not get even basic functionality right?
I'll start with the fact that when starting a new episode I almost always get a Loading Error. Fine, I click the icon to try again and it works about one out of three times. The other two times it skips to the next episode (which I just got done listening to). I mean it's like it's not even trying. I click the episode and immediately get the Loading Error.
But the really frustrating thing? I have been listening to an episode of Judge John Hodgman (Ep 498 - A Rollicking Docket) (yes, I know, I am behind--that's what not driving as much has done). The TuneIn player got absolutely stuck on one particular section of the podcast (maybe 10 minutes in?). I would listen for awhile, get out of the car and when I returned it would be right back at that original spot. I would try to use the skip ahead button to fast forward to where I was, and then wham, it would go right back to that "stuck" point. So I would try again and listen without fast forwarding (repeating that part of the podcast) and got maybe 10 more minutes in and then wham, right back to the stuck point. So then I tried using the slider (which rarely works well in this situation, but I wasn't about to hit the skip ahead button 50 times to try to get up to where I was, and seriously, even though the slider indicated I was at any other point in the podcast, it just kept playing the section it was stuck on.
Finally I just gave up and went back to streaming from my phone for that episode. When it was time to move to the next episode, I figured I would try again in the car, hoping that maybe it was just that episode that was the problem. So I am listening to Ep 499 when about 3 minutes in, guess what: it went immediately back to that same point in Ep 498 that it was stuck on. It's like my TuneIn player is possessed! Honestly, what is so friggin' hard about this!
Sorry for the rant, but I needed to vent!