So lately I’ve been seeing shorts on YT about a D&D podcast that looks mildly interesting and I’m running out of good webnovels to listen to with TTS at work. So I thought I would give podcasts a shot…
They have instream ads… And it’s the same damn ad on repeat Not the same ad, that was a Conan podcast I listened to in the past, but still it’s like 4 ads in a row. Is there a tool to download these podcasts and strip their ads? I just read that there’s a way to download them via rss so that’s what I’m going to try now. But manual ad removal might get tedious over a hundred episodes.
I can’t imagine with all the nerd centric podcasts that we wouldn’t have automated a way to extract ads by this point.
Edit: At this point, trying a number of things. yt-dlp seems to be the best way to do it. If the podcast is available on YouTube someone most likely has already submitted SponsorBlock segments for it. You can then use yt-dlp to download the episode or the whole playlist using this command:
yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 192K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist 'PLAYLIST URL'
You can even run it directly in Termux on your Android phone and skip sponsors on the go.
I think it’s because privacy is less an issue with podcasts (ads don’t have as many options to track) and enshitification of the experience has been on a slower roll than, say, youtube. Lately some solutions are out there in the form of commercial apps but they are limited and who knows if their biz model will survive. I’d like to see an open source solution but I haven’t found one.
example: https://www.adblockpodcast.com/
Signed up, I don’t mind paying but it seems like everything is $10, like I’m not signing up to Rooster Teeth’s site and pay $7/month just so I can listen to a single podcast. It’s taking me about 5 mins a file to open, strip the intro, find the midroll, delete the midroll and strip the outroll. Will that get annoying longterm… probably, but it saves me paying for a bunch of content I don’t care about.