As someone who aggressively adblocks everything, one of the final places that ads can still reach me is in annoying ad reads within podcasts. Youtube sponsorblock is incredible but it seems no one has yet adapted this for podcasts. Has anyone else managed to find a solution here? As far as i can tell in my googleing, this doesn’t yet exist. Anyone else extremely interested in something that skips/removes sponsor segments from podcasts?
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since podcasts are I think just RSS feeds of audio files (mp3 for those I’ve checked) the ads aren’t in any way marked in the stream. The only thing I’ve found is adjusting the skip buttons in antennapod so that skip fwd does 10 seconds, and back does 5; that seems to let me avoid listening to most of the ad; tap fwd until it’s back in material, then back once.
But I listen to a lot less podcasts; if I want hands- and eyes-free material I’m more likely to use TTS in my (text) RSS feed reader of choice, currently Feeder.
I mean people said this about SponsorBlock, but it turns out you can crowd source the timestamps… If you built an easy enough UI.
Or maybe AI can generate those timestamps.
Antennapod also has an option to skip the first X seconds of a pod and the last X seconds. It’s really useful when an episode starts with 3 minutes of ads.
Podcast republic has this ability too
Brother, from one pirate to another, I think it would be more convenient to support your favorite podcast and they usually upload an ad free version for supporters.
Lol
I have not found this to be the case. There are only a few podcasts I felt I enjoyed enough to financially support, and I stopped donations because I still had to sit through ads. I don’t like feeling as if I’m being monetized twice.
Be really cool if more hosts made ad-free supporter versions.
Not for podcasts on big networks like iHeartRadio as far as I know.
I’ve been listening to Stuff You Should Know for years and since iHeart bought them out the volume and shear annoyance of their ads has gone through the roof. Used to be the actual podcast presenters themselves doing a few quick spots for Squarespace or whatever. Wasn’t jarring because it was the same voices and they didn’t do a bunch of ridiculous zany bullshit. Now every episode has multiple 5-7 ad blocks of the most banal annoying crap.
Would happily use sponsor block on that if I could. I would love a podcast app with this functionality built in.
IHeartradio is the worst. I have dropped off listening to podcasts I otherwise really like. Behind the bastards, anything Robert Evans does really. The ads are too bad.
Behind the bastards makes it more bearable because they really take the piss out of the ads every time.
Behind the Bastards has an ad free subscription now (on Apple Podcasts only but soon for Android apparently). Look up “Cooler Zone Media.”
That’s good to hear! I’m not on iOS but I’ll keep an eye out for the Android solution.
I really hate them and would drop them in a hot min if it wasn’t that SYSK is like the best bedtime podcast in the world.
Nothing says relaxing bedtime podcast like loud obnoxious ads.
Yeah it’s not been ideal lately
I do support a few to get ad free versions but these are almost nonexistent. very few podcasts do this.
My mistake, I only do a few podcasts and they usually advertise their ad free stuff.
I do wish that was more common. I have no problem with Patreon to remove the ads.
I’ve been down this rabbit hole and found nothing specifically for podcasts, but a lot of pods get posted to YouTube channels, which is a solved problem.
I’ve noticed a major increase in ads injected into podcasts. In particular, I listen to 6 podcasts from Marketplace APM (Marketplace Tech, Morning Report (UK, US, Midmorning), Marketplace, and Make Me Smart). Warning, mini-rant incoming…
They started with preroll and post roll spots which were just self-promotion for their other shows. This was annoying on it’s own because I’d hear the same ads like 12 times a day. But this year those spots were converted into location-based targeted ads, they are totally not the same volume or tonal style totally breaking my concentration. And there are spots in the middle of the episodes too. So now I would be “forced” to listen to the same ads like 30 times a day. Unbearable.
As to solutions:
There’s an existing feature request for the top Open Source android podcast app AntennaPod.
I’ve been planning out my own hypothetical approach. The idea would be to use multiple strategies (similar to what @bet@lemm.ee, @133arc585 and @pallettownbry recommended in this thread) but actually implemented in a gPodder compatible self-hosted podcast server. This would allow one to offload the resource intensive work (audio analysis, audio transcription, LLM) to a more capable server (hypothetically) while being compatible with nearly any podcast app.
P.S. I actually pay for premium services for ad-free content where available: CBB World, Crooked Media Friends of the Pod, and Stitcher Premium (RIP).
As someone who setup his own nas over the pandemic I really like this approach. Needed a time intensive project to stay sane and I keep finding more useful things it can do.
Another thought I’ve had, plex has a skip intro feature. This works by scanning the audio from multiple episodes and showing the skip button when available. Maybe something like that could build up an ad library of the most obnoxious repetitive podcast ads and work across different podcasts. It wouldn’t work for unique self reads though.
I wish I had the technical knowledge to build something like this but I done even know where to begin.
Yeah, AntennaPod already has an auto skip config that I use to skip the first or last N seconds. Which I’ve configured. But it’s not technically always 30 seconds or 120 seconds. And that doesn’t help with mid episode ads.
Podcasts on what? I listen to most of my podcasts on YouTube so sponserblock takes care of that.
Have you tried listening to them on YouTube? I find most people I want to listen to upload them there too.
That’s a decent solution, but unfortunately doesn’t have handy podcast app features like silence trimming, voice boosting, etc. Great suggestion though!
silence trimming, voice boosting,
this is the first i’m even hearing of these features existing, maybe I should take a closer look at my apps
There’s an app I use called “Snip’d” which uses AI to detect different chapter segments of your podcasts. It doesn’t automatically skip anything for you but it does a pretty good job of finding and pointing out where the ads are and breaking the entire episode up into different chapters.
That sounds like an app begging to be modded to add an autoskip feature.
Indeed my friend.
I love the idea of using AI for for ad skipping. Let it do something positive instead of just our jobs in the near future.
