I’m happy to adopt a new podcast app if it has sponsorblock natively or through a plug-in. Otherwise let me know if there’s some other way to make it work. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work as all of the segments tagged for skipping are crowdsourced which would also work for Podcasts.
That’s a pretty reasonable ad load. Have you listened to 99% Invisible lately? Each episode is about 10 minutes long, and it seems like at least 50% of it is now ads and sponsorship stuff.
Stitcher/SiriusXM has absolutely wrecked that podcast. I don’t know if Roman knew what he was getting into when he sold, but I’ve either lost a lot of faith in his wisdom if he didn’t or in his scruples if he did.
I wish there was. I listen to this particular podcast that has the same sponsor for years and they do make it much more entertaining than the average podcast, but I still find myself manually skipping it every time I sense it coming. And because they make it more part of the conversation, the ad moment lasts for minutes each episode, so I’m sure every regular listener had enough of that.
Right now I use Pocket Casts which lets you set a specific time to skip at the beginning or end of a podcast. Useful for static ads but not for the dynamic ones throughout the show.
I also use Pocket Casts …and I just skip the ads manually. I set the skip forward time to 30 seconds and I set skip back to 10, makes it pretty easy to hop past them.
Podcasts are yet one more thing that ads have more or less ruined for me. I rarely listen to them due to the sponsorships. It is like trying to watch YouTube on my TV through the YouTube app instead of the Smarttube app.
If the price was what I deemed acceptable and the method of doing so was decently centralized. I’m not going to sign up to 15 different podcasts with 15 separate transactions every month.
So yes, I would pay for them if they make it attractive to pay for. Ultimately the viability of their business model is not my problem. So even if it is one guy in his garage, it is on him to create something I would be willing to pay for. If they can’t then oh well I can easily do without their podcast.
Hm! I look forward to trying Antennapod or pocketcasts since Gpodcasts is getting the Google Funeral treatment. :( Thanks for the likely superior alternatives.
But every ad on every episode of every podcast can be different. Right now with pocket cast, I skip ahead 30 seconds at a time then go back 10 seconds. But I’d rather automate it
Saaaame. Only thing I can think of is a server to download the podcasts, then some kind of ML/AI/LLM chicanery to transcribe, ID and timestamp the sponsor segments? Then chop it out with ffmpeg?
Edit: looks like Podgrab can download the files, the rest might be doable with a bit of scripting.
Because a lot of podcast networks have dynamically inserted ads that change based on your geolocation, I’ve found that my Pihole can often provide a feed without any ads. I assume it’s like a fallback in case the geolocating fails. So I set Pocketcasts to only download episodes on my home network.
So without having looked into it really, my assumption is that these podcast hosts will serve a specific file based on the response to an API call. If my Pihole blocks that call, they don’t want to serve nothing, so they fallback to a file that sometimes has “generic” ads (often for US-based companies) or other times no ads at all. Of course this doesn’t work for all podcasts, and as mentioned sometimes still has ads anyway. One day I might look more closely into it.
Ah, I assume the audio file is being put together server side and customised to the downloaders locality. The pihole is likely obfuscating that and causing a default version to be downloaded
I use podcast addicts’ auto slip feature. Most podcasts I listen to have a set ad of a set length at the start or end. You can set an auto slip on a per subscription basis. Works for me
I think the only reasonable way to do that would be using AI since the sponsors are placed randomly throughout usually. Unless you listen to a specific podcast and they do same length of sponsor in same time slot every video you could automate something that cuts it out.
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