PC Alternative to iTunes to download podcasts and sync to Android?

[YaSo]

Is there an alternative to iTunes for the PC that includes a good podcast search feature? Will it also sync my music / podcast / audiobook playlists to my Android phone? Any help (with actual user experience) would really be appreciated.

I have used iTunes for Windows since 2005 when I got my 'iPod with Video' and started listening to podcasts. I gave up on iPods when new ones were all touchscreen and my old Nano 5th gen died a few years ago.

I still used iTunes to download the podcasts and make a playlist, but now I sync it to my Android phone with iSyncr.

I hated the UI of iTunes 11 and 12, so I kept using the last version of 10 that was available. This worked well until this year when several podcasts stopped updating. It turned out that iTunes 10 worked differently than the latest version so I upgraded to 12.9. Which is horrible for my PC.

It lags for 10-30 seconds when I open a new window or try to access the iTunes store for new podcasts, and when I have to manually switch from 'music' to 'podcasts' to audiobooks' to see my various media or playlist is a game of click and wait. iTunes 10 was fairly snappy when I used it a few months ago on my Windows 7 machine. I have 16 gigs of ram on a quad Core i7-7700k gaming PC. Modern iTunes should not lag this much. Other programs I run do not pause for several seconds like this does.

Thanks in advance,
Steve

 

[B. Diddy]

You've probably already looked into this, but have you tried Google Play Music for your podcasts? They have a pretty wide selection, and your listening progress should sync across all devices you're using (that are logged into the same Google account). On your PC, you can listen using the Google Play Music website.