5 minute ad breaks every 15 minutes kinda ruin the experience.
I really want podcast apps to hook into SponsorBlock.
Right now I’m listening to very few English podcasts because of all the advertisement. I switched to German and Swedish because most of them don’t have any advertisement in them.
Podcasts often dynamically generate ads at the point of download, making the SponsorBlock-approach unviable: since the media is expected to be variable-length you can’t store media positions that map to advertisement segments.
You could potentially match on audio, though – look for the 15 seconds of podcast audio preceding the ad, and the 15 seconds following it, if folks reported it in a sponsorblock way.
Alternatively, we could build a shazam-style database of 30 second podcast ads, then skip them when they’re identified. There isn’t much variety out there.
Ah interesting, that just shows that I have successfully avoided subscribing to those. The few ones with ads I listen to get the ads read by the hosts like in YouTube videos.
Can confirm, at least for Acast distribution, I generally get no ads when I’m not in an English speaking country at the time of download.
However, iHeart podcasts are always absolutely crammed full of ads everywhere.
like others have pointed out, this makes automatic detection easier not harder if true. Just cut the segments that move around, audio analysis and even transcripts (they don’t have to be good! just good enough to identify missing segment!) are pretty mature.
I really just want a podcast app that replaces Pocket Casts (I use the free version).
What I look is a client that works with pretty much all the possible gadgets (even a damn Amazon Alexa) and have Sync between all of them).
Pocket Casts does this to me but the Alexa client is kinda broken (it never saves/sync the progress) and the PC client is behind the paywall.
Spotify is a close one for what I want… But I just don’t like it.
There is a paid version of pocket casts?
Yes, the free version doesn’t let you organize podcasts into folders for example. The paid version has a browser accessible version(so one can access from PC) , some gigs(10 GB?) of cloud storage and some extra theme able icons.
It used to be a one time purchase back in the day. Then they moved to a yearly subscription model. I think I used their paid variant for one year or so.
I recently moved to AntennaPod, which is available on F Droid. It is more or less at feature parity with the free version of Pocketcasts. It technically has gPodder integration to sync your podcasts online but honestly that service breaks down a lot and is unreliable multiple times.
Oh, yeah, wait, I am using AntennaPod too. The subscription stuff was actually the reason I switched from Pocket Casts. Mixed up the names. I’d claim old age, but I’m not that old yet, really.
I’m using antennapod because I had suspicions based on the ads I was getting that PocketCasts was selling the info of podcasts in my queue/listening history. After that I read their privacy policy to confirm that’s something they do and deleted my account/the app
edit: important to add, I had a paid subscription account and they still appeared to be selling data on me
If I remember correctly, the app was originally built by an Australian public broadcaster and then sold to WordPress Matt, so yeah.
Subscription only mode I think… A huge nope for me.
I used it for one year(yes, I paid sigh) but ultimately didn’t see value in it. Subscription model doesn’t make sense for a podcast app and I mostly listened to on mobile eitherways, so I switched to Antennapod recently. I tried a couple of other alternatives including Podcast Republic but those seem a little too bloated in terms of features.
Can you share the German podcasts you enjoy?
Echo der Zeit, Datenschutz plaudereien, NZZ akzent (one little ad in the middle), Netzpodcast, SRF Input, News plus, Focus,
Some may be swiss german, tho.
I listen to several ad supported English language podcasts, and most of them seem to have difficulties with
Pocket CastsAntennaPod, or some other part of my setup. The only ones that do get ads placed are the ones that use Spotify Megaphone for their backend.Ah, I should have known that it is spotify…
Podcasts are a leftover from the non centralized and non-monetized internet of the past. Because is that most Podcasts are still available as rss feeds, so you should only ever get adds if they are spoken by the Podcasts hosts. Ate you taking about those? Only something like sponsorblock would help against those. I use antennapod (fdroid) on android to listen to Podcasts. Sine hosts always start their podcast with an add, but you can autoskip the first minute of a certain podcast with antennapod every time. It has a setting for that. Antenna pod itself is foss software without adds.
Many modern podcast solutions seem to be injecting ads into the audio file they serve, to varying degrees of success.
😮
Google is doing this. I will see the time increase and get random skip backs pl on antenna pod.
Yeah, any decent podcast app that has a 10s / 15s time skip is the only reliable way to deal with ads. Just skip ahead a few times until the ad is over.
If there were a reliable way to auto-skip ads then ads would lose all their value which could shut down some of our favorite podcasts. It sucks that ads are a necessary evil for podcasting, but there is no clean way around that unless we dismantled capitalism and switched to some hybrid of market socialism and public funding
God, I wish there was. If there is, I haven’t found it. And I’ve been looking
But how do you learn about raycons? Seriously, there are some podcasters that i really like. The podcast and the people behind it. But it’s getting really hard to not dislike someone that’s willingly trying to sell you garbage. Like your best friend from high school that is trying to pull you in his pyramid scheme. I used to listen to the marc maron podcast, because he’s pretty good at talking to people and he had some cool guests. His sponsors were that stamp company and some website company. Now marcs whole thing is that he’s a boomer that doesn’t like new things. One day he did his show and then it was time for a commercial and he was like: and today’s sponsor is ROCKET LEAGUE. ROCKET LEAGUE is a fun and exciting… What in the fuck. Thins isn’t just a scam, you have not the slightest idea what you are advertising for.
During the early couple years of MBMBAM, I didn’t mind their ad reads. They made it funny. I never skipped Cumtown’s ad reads because they read them so shitty it was extremely funny.
Every other podcast I detest the reads.
Fuck you Shopify, your loud grating DING makes me flinch every time it blasts in my ears. I hate you.
Watch them using the grayjay app, sponsorblock should be in it.
If the podcast is available on YouTube, Newpipe does the job brilliantly and you even have forks/options to skip sponsor ads too.
You can set Pocket Casts to skip the first or last X seconds of an episode, which I’ve found helps. I also set fast forward to go 30s and rewind to 15 so it’s easier to scrub forward through an ad and I’m never too far off when I go over and have to rewind.
Are the ads part of the podcast?
If not antennapod is good
I like Antenna Pod for this - my BT connections let me use the Forward 30 Seconds feature when m driving or running. Since most ads are 30 seconds long, I can cruise through them easily.
This is desperately needed.
I saw sponsorblock-ml and am playing with it using whisperx for transcript/timestamps and ffmpeg for cutting out the timestamps that were detected by sponsorblock-ml then reserving that audio as an rss feed.
It’s not great so far though
People who are looking for direct integration between podcast players and SponsorBlock seem to be missing that a lot of podcasts these days that do have advertising in them oftentimes have dynamic ads where the ad audio will change depending on the day, the geographical location of the download, etc. So SponsorBlock can’t actually account for what are essentially dynamic timestamps Whereas with YouTube you typically have fairly static timestamps that can be shared across a user base, only smaller podcasts are really going to be able to be captured by SponsorBlock unless someone discovers a way to mod an Android APK to essentially prevent the client-side compilation of ads and the original podcast audio assuming that there is a podcast app that does this on the client side.
If they have a YouTube version I use https://www.podtube.me/ to make an RSS feed and put it in my Podcast player of choice.
i use YouTube Music Revanced and I’ve never gotten any ads for my podcasts
Does this happen on iOS too? I listen to podcasts every night for an hour and never hear any ads except for the ones encoded with the file, ie sponsor ads.
I think they might be referring to a specific Poscast. They’re generally free and finding one that doesn’t have ads is easy. If it was Spotify they would have asked for Spotify.
And OP is it is Spotify and you’re on amdroid there’s patches apks that block ads.
Edit: Holy fuck my grammar is bad.