QUILL Cast 2.0

Version 2.0.0, released October 3, 2026.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I do it with a screen reader. For years that meant apps where the list I wanted was three windows away, buttons that said “Play” without saying what they would play, and news that went by while I was busy in another program.

So I made the podcast app I wanted. It is one window. Every list in it works from the keyboard. And when something happens that you would want to know about, it tells you in a sentence. QUILL Cast is free, it runs on Windows, and it works with JAWS, NVDA and Narrator.

I open it every morning with my protein drink . I hope you end up doing the same.

Jeff

You’ll meet two new faces in these notes. QUILLBert finds the things worth trying, and QUILLBee tells you what has changed. They’re new around here, and Meet QUILLBert and QUILLBee has the proper introductions.

This build: 2.0.0 (build 4)

QUILL Cast now runs on Python 3.14. When you install it, older Python 3.13 runtimes that no QuillVille app uses any more are removed for you.

Choosing a show and hide key is easier: Record Key… (Alt+R) in the Show and Hide Key window writes out the combination you press. You can still type it.

Already using Cast? Before you update

A note from QUILLBee: Install 2.0 over the version you have. Your podcasts, your folders, your place in every episode, your notes and your settings carry on as they were. The welcome window only greets someone with no podcasts yet, so it won’t stop you on the way in.

A few things work differently now:

Try this first

  1. Open QUILL Cast. The first time, one short welcome window says hello and asks where you would like Cast to open each day. Answer it, or press Skip.
  2. Press Ctrl+N to add a podcast. Type the name of one you like, arrow through the results, and press Enter to hear what it is about. If it is the one you meant, press Alt+O to follow it.
  3. Close that window and press Ctrl+Shift+S to go to your podcasts. Arrow to the one you followed and press Enter. Its newest unheard episode starts playing.
  4. While it plays, press Ctrl+Right to skip ahead 30 seconds and Ctrl+Left to go back 15. Ctrl+Shift+Up speeds it up a little. Ctrl+P pauses, and pressing it again picks up where you stopped.
  5. Press Ctrl+2 for Now Playing, a window with everything about the episode. Ctrl+1 brings you back.
  6. When you have a few minutes, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 for the tutorials. They walk you through the rest at your own pace.

Want a library to explore straight away? Podcasts > Follow ACB Media Podcasts (Ctrl+Alt+B) follows ACB Media’s whole directory in one go.

QUILLBert found something: “In one go” means all of it. QUILLBert pressed Ctrl+Alt+B to see what would happen, and he now has more listening lined up than he can get through this year. He’s calling that a good problem.

One window with everything in it

Cast is a single window, and Tab takes you through it from top to bottom. At the top is a line saying what is playing; press Ctrl+T from anywhere and Cast reads it to you. Under that is Find. Press Ctrl+F, type part of a podcast name, an episode title or one of your own notes, and the list fills with matches. Escape puts things back.

Next comes the list of places, and beside it the place you are in. Places are where your episodes live: the Inbox, New Episodes, Continue Listening, Favorites, your playlists, the Play Queue, Downloads, Notifications, and Podcasts, which holds everything you follow in folders. There is even a place called Personal Audio for your own recordings and audiobooks. Each place has a live count, and each has a key of its own in the View menu, so after a day or two you will stop using the list and jump straight there.

Tab once more and you are reading the show notes of the episode you were on. Below them, every button says exactly what it will act on. You hear “Play Blind Abilities”, never a bare “Play”.

In any list of episodes, Enter plays and Space adds to the Play Queue. Shift+F10 opens a menu with everything else you can do. Delete takes an episode out of that one place and nowhere else, and Cast tells you so. Press F2 and give an episode a name of your own. Cast remembers.

Along the bottom is a status bar with your volume, speed, counts, downloads and the clock. It stays out of your way until you press F6 to go in.

QUILLBert and QUILLBee:

QUILLBert: The Play Queue window’s gone. I’ve looked in every menu.

QUILLBee: It’s a place now, in this window. Ctrl+Shift+Q goes straight there, and every other place has a key of its own in the View menu.

Finding podcasts to follow

Add Podcast (Ctrl+N) looks in Apple’s directory and in Podcast Index at the same time, so you only need to type a name. Before you follow anything, press Enter on a result to hear what the podcast is about and what its last ten episodes were called. You can also paste a feed address. Feeds that need a password, such as a Patreon supporter feed, work too, and Windows keeps the password safe for you.

Coming from another podcast app? Save your list from it as an OPML file, then press Import OPML in the Add Podcast window (Alt+I). However long your list is, Cast brings it across, folders and all, empty folders included, and you can keep listening while it works. Your old shows arrive quietly: Cast does not announce their whole back catalogue as new episodes, and each one shows the real date of its newest episode, so the ones that stopped years ago are easy to spot.

Changed your mind about a podcast? Unfollow it, and if that was a mistake, Ctrl+Z brings it back with its episodes and downloads. Ctrl+Z rescues you the same way after removing or marking a whole batch of episodes. If the mistake was a few steps back, Edit > Undo History (Ctrl+Shift+Z) lists the last ten things you can take back, and you choose the one you want.

When the list gets long, folders keep it tidy. A folder can play the newest unheard episode from every podcast inside it, which is a lovely way to start a day. Chapter 4 of the user guide, Finding podcasts you will love, shows how to set them up.

You can also choose how the library is laid out. Press Ctrl+Shift+R for View > Rearrange Library and Inbox. Show your folders first, folders only or podcasts only, sort them the way you like, and choose what the counts say. Each choice takes effect as you make it, so you can try one and listen. The same choices are in Preferences, in The library section.

Listening

The Episode menu (Alt+E) has every key for whatever is playing, and the ones from “Try this first” will carry you a long way. A few more worth knowing:

Speed can belong to a podcast. Speed up the slow talker, leave the fast one alone, and each podcast remembers its own. The same goes for loudness: give the podcast recorded in a cupboard a Volume Boost in Settings for This Podcast (Ctrl+Alt+,), and it plays louder while everything else stays as it was.

Chapters work even when a podcast does not publish any. Cast can find them in the show notes or a transcript, and can skip the sponsor chapter for you every time it comes round.

The show notes are a plain text field you can read like any document, with the podcast’s headings and links kept. Press H to move between headings, Tab to move between links, and Enter to open one. If the notes give a timestamp, Enter on it plays from that point.

About ten seconds before an episode ends, Cast tells you what is coming next, so a new voice never arrives out of nowhere.

Now Playing (Ctrl+2) is where I spend most evenings. It has a position slider that speaks minutes and seconds as you move it, the chapters, the sleep timer, the show notes and a place for a note of your own. From there you can also share the moment: Cast copies a sentence like “Blind Abilities, Episode 214, at 41 minutes 12 seconds”, with a link that opens the episode at that second for anyone who has Cast.

Keeping up without keeping watch

Cast checks your podcasts for you, on a schedule you choose for all of them or one at a time. Press F5 whenever you cannot wait.

Feed Check (Ctrl+Shift+C) tells you which podcasts need something, and why, in plain words: removed by the host, a web address that has lapsed, an address that now opens a web page, a feed the publisher emptied, a host that turns podcast apps away. When a show has moved, Find This Show’s New Feed looks it up for you and moves it to its new feed, keeping everything you have heard.

New episodes wait in the Inbox (Ctrl+Shift+I) for you to decide about them. You choose which podcasts send episodes there, and you can keep it short so it never turns into a wall. Press Delete on one you do not want. If you have turned on Delete its downloaded file in Preferences, in the Data section, its download goes too, unless it is an episode you chose to keep.

Notifications (Ctrl+Shift+N) remember what Cast told you, so the episode that arrived while you were on the phone is still there afterwards. A new episode in the list offers to play it now or add it to the queue. And when you open Cast in the morning, one sentence tells you what came in overnight.

The Play Queue (Ctrl+Shift+Q) is what plays next. Shuffle it, clear it, or save a running order you use every week and put it back with one choice. When Cast put an episode there for you, its row says why, such as “queued by Auto-Queue” or “queued by a watched folder”. Choose Auto-Queue New Episodes on a podcast’s menu (Shift+F10) and its new episodes go straight into the queue. A daily news podcast can expire, too: choose Queue Expiry… on its menu, and yesterday’s headlines step aside to Recently Expired (Ctrl+Shift+X), where they wait a week in case you want them back.

Fallen behind on a podcast? Mark All as Played… (Alt+Shift+E) catches you up in one go. It asks first, and your downloads stay where they are.

Which of your podcasts have stopped working? Podcasts > Feed Check… (Ctrl+Shift+C) lists the ones that need something, worst first, and checks nothing until you ask it to. In Settings for This Podcast you can also ask Cast to tell you if a podcast goes quiet for a few weeks.

Playlists can be lists you build by hand or smart ones that follow a rule, such as everything under twenty minutes from one folder. There are five starter playlists ready to try.

Cast can keep the newest few episodes of each podcast downloaded, so they are ready when the internet is not. It keeps an eye on disk space for you and never removes an episode you have queued or started. When you want the space back now, Free Up Space (Ctrl+Alt+F) applies your storage rules straight away and tells you how much space came back, and Run Housekeeping Now (Ctrl+Alt+H) does the whole tidy-up at once. Both are in the Command Palette, and on the Downloads menu in Advanced mode.

Now and then a podcast moves its audio, or a download comes out cut short or silent. You do not need to unfollow and follow again. Press Shift+F10 on the episode and choose Refresh Episode Audio. Cast reads the feed again, asks once, and fetches a fresh copy. Your place, your played mark and your notes stay as they were. It is in the Command Palette too.

Your own recordings can arrive by themselves too. Point Cast at the folder your voice recorder, your downloads or a shared Dropbox folder fills, using Podcasts > Watched Folders (Ctrl+Alt+W). From then on, whatever lands there turns up in Personal Audio, announced once and never twice, and your original stays where it was. Chapter 4 of the user guide walks you through it.

And if a podcast keeps sending things you never want, such as trailers, reruns or a daily two-minute segment, choose Filter Episodes Like This on one of them. Cast writes the rule, and those episodes stay out of your way. Nothing filtered is ever deleted.

QUILLBert noticed: Before anything is saved, the drafted rule tells you how many recent episodes it would catch, and Preview (Alt+V) shows you which. QUILLBert tried it on one trailer and found eleven more he’d been politely skipping for months.

Making it yours

Preferences (Ctrl+,) holds the settings every podcast shares. Settings for This Podcast (Ctrl+Alt+,) lets one podcast be different, with its own speed, schedule, downloads, even how Cast pronounces its name. Every setting has F1 help that says what it does.

QUILLBee’s tip: Can’t remember what you changed for one podcast? In Settings for This Podcast, press What Have I Changed? (Alt+H). It lists every setting that podcast does differently, and it changes nothing.

You never have to hunt for a setting. Type a word in Find a setting at the top of Preferences, press Down to reach the matches, and press Enter on one to go straight to it, whichever section it is in. Searching never changes a setting. Quill Radio and QUILL Lite have the same box.

If you use Quill Radio too, you can keep the two alike. In Preferences, in The window section, turn on Share these choices with my other Quill apps. Announce dialog transitions, and what a one-key action answers with, then stay the same in every Quill app where you have turned it on, and Cast tells you when it picks up a choice from another app. Nothing about your keys or your screen reader is ever shared.

You can decide what each row in a list says first: the title, the podcast or the date. You can reorder, rename or hide places until the list matches how you listen. And you can change what Enter does on an episode.

If Cast feels like too much, View > Customize Features (Ctrl+Alt+C) switches off whatever you do not use, and it disappears from the menus and lists. There is a Just Listen profile for a plain player. If you are coming from Earshot on your phone, try the Earshot-like profile.

Every key in Cast can be changed in Help > Keyboard Shortcuts. Help > Keyboard Shortcuts Sheet (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K) lists every key you have. If you forget where something lives, Go To (Ctrl+G) lists every place by number, and the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) finds any command by name. Winamp fans will find X, C, V, B and Z doing what they always did.

Help > Quiet Hours (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z) keeps Cast from talking on its own overnight. Anything you ask for still answers.

Close the window and Cast can keep playing from the system tray, if you would like it to. Ctrl+W sends it there any time.

Your library goes where you go

Back up your whole library to one file, with your podcasts, playlists, positions, notes and bookmarks, using Podcasts > Back Up My Podcasts… (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B), and put it back later with Restore from a Backup… (Ctrl+Alt+F12). When you get a new computer, Help > Export My Setup (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+X) moves your library, settings and keys across in one file.

Listening Statistics (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S) tells you which podcasts you listen to most, how long, and when, from your own history on this computer. Its Year in Review button tells the story of your year in a few friendly sentences you can copy or save.

An episode can come out of Cast too. On an episode’s menu (Shift+F10), Save Episode Audio As… saves a copy of the audio wherever you choose, even before it is downloaded, and Copy Podcast Link copies the podcast’s feed address to give to a friend.

If you listen on more than one computer, Cast can keep your place in each episode in step through a folder you already sync, such as Dropbox or OneDrive. There is no account to make. Podcasts > Carry My Place Between Machines is where you set it up. Continue Listening then tells you where a place came from, such as “last played on Kitchen laptop”. Check Also share the podcasts I follow, and their folders, and a podcast you follow on one computer turns up on the others, in the same folder. It is off until you choose it, and private feeds are never shared.

Cast also shares its library with QUILL and Quill Radio on the same computer. Follow a podcast here and it is there too. Pause an episode in Radio, and Cast picks it up where you left off.

AI help, if you want it

Cast can ask an AI to summarize the show notes of the episode you are on, or answer a question about them. It is off until you turn it on, and nothing is sent until you ask. Help > AI Features is where to start, and Chapter 6 of the user guide, Making Cast yours, explains what is sent and where.

The AI can run on QUILL’s free service, on your ChatGPT plan, or on your own key. Use My ChatGPT Subscription (Alt+F5) signs Cast in to the ChatGPT plan you already pay for. Cast keeps its own sign-in, so signing out of another Quill app leaves Cast signed in. If another one is already signed in on this computer, the window tells you, and signing in here is one Allow in your browser. Use My Own AI Key (Alt+F2) takes a key from OpenAI or from Google Gemini: choose the company in the Provider list, then paste its key. With your ChatGPT plan or a Gemini key, Ask About an Image (Ctrl+F5) works too.

It can also help with your podcasts: suggest folders for a messy library, tell you what a podcast is about, say whether an episode matches what you care about, summarise an episode, pick a run of episodes that fits the time you have, turn a sentence into a smart playlist, and give rough chapters better names. Every suggestion waits for you in a list, and nothing changes until you apply it. And Tidy the Podcasts I Follow finds podcasts that stopped years ago, ones you follow twice, and feeds that keep failing, without sending anything anywhere.

Choose Stable, Beta or Dev

New in this version: Release Channel…, on the Help menu. Every copy stays on Stable, the version we check with JAWS and NVDA, unless you choose otherwise. Beta gets new features a few weeks early; Dev is the work in progress, for testers.

Arrowing through the three only explains them. If you choose Beta or Dev, a short warning says plainly what could go wrong and how to come back, and nothing moves until you check I understand and choose Move. Before it moves, Cast saves a copy of your subscriptions, playlists, listening places and settings. Downloaded episodes are not copied, and updates don’t change them.

Coming back to Stable is safe. If Stable can read everything you have saved, Cast offers to go straight back. If it can’t yet, Cast says so plainly and lets you either wait for Stable to catch up (it moves you across by itself), or go back to the copy of your subscriptions and settings saved when you joined. A copy of how things are right now is saved first, so nothing is thrown away.

On Beta and Dev, Cast downloads new versions in the background so they are ready when you are, and never installs one without asking. It waits on a metered connection, during Quiet Hours, and while Quill Radio is recording.

Quill Radio and QUILL Lite share one engine with Cast on your computer. When one of you moves to Beta or Dev, it gets its own copy of the engine, so the apps you leave on Stable are never touched. That copy uses about 335 MB of disk space until your last app comes back to Stable.

If an update ever fails to start, it undoes itself, puts back the version you had, and tells you so the next time Cast opens. The window’s Update History button shows everything the updater has done.

Help > About now shows a build number after the version: this release is 2.0.0 (build 1). If a fix comes out without a new version number, it is a newer build, and Check for Updates offers it to you.

Dev preview: 2.0.0-dev.20261006.2

This preview is separate from the 2.0.0 (build 1) release above. It makes large podcast imports and refreshes easier to work through: OPML files are read and planned in the background, and imported subscriptions stay in your library if you stop the optional feed check. Refresh All has a separate progress window; closing it does not stop the run, while Stop remaining checks cancels only feeds that have not started. In the Podcasts tree, Left Arrow now closes an expanded folder without moving focus out of the tree.

When you need a hand

The user guide covers everything here in more detail, one chapter at a time, and Chapter 8, When you need a hand, is there whenever you get stuck. Start with the six steps at the top, press F1 whenever you wonder where you are, and let me know what you think.