[sleepybrett]

Because there are specialization that are important. Longer form audio generally requires a more robust set of controls for chapters, audio playback speed, timed skips and resume than a bog standard audio player. Not to mention that a podcast player is going to need functionality for finding new podcasts, displaying information both at a podcast level and individual episode level, providing some kind of way to 'subscribe' and thus download said podcast (for offline listening) or stream it on the fly.

General tools are great and I'm never going to argue that there should not be generalized tools (like say a VLC), but specialized tools are also great and should be encouraged where they make sense. To me the differences between listening to music and listening to audiobooks or podcasts are different.

[iggldiggl]

My problem is – certain features of podcast apps (like tracking of your playback position and tracking of listened/unlistened episodes) are also very useful for my collection of radio comedy. That collection however mostly doesn't come from actual podcasts, but instead has been accumulated from all sorts of places.

Most podcast client apps don't allow manually importing files, so I'd have to maintain fake podcast feeds for all my local files. There's software for that, too, but it'd still be more cumbersome than with iTunes where I just need to set the media type of those files to "Podcast" and I'm done.

[chrisjj]

> Because there are specialization that are important. Longer form audio generally requires a more robust set of controls for chapters, audio playback speed, timed skips and resume than a bog standard audio player

That's merely a reason not to use one /inadequate/ app for all audio.

Inadequacy is not an app requirement.