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.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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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
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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 Casts~~ AntennaPod, 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.
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If it's one of the podcasts that uses a service to auto-insert ads, you can always change your VPN to a country that wouldn't be relevant and it'll usually download without ads. It almost always works if I set mine to Japan or Thailand.
Huh, TIL that is how the ads worked with Podcasts... Does it transcode the audio file?
It is funny to have Spanish ads while I listen to English podcasts lol (native language is Spanish).
Obviously, the live read ads by the podcast hosts will still be there, but yep, the other ads are all usually targeted ones inserted when you download it. Once it's downloaded, you can change your VPN back to wherever so you don't have to deal with every site defaulting to Thai or Japanese lol.
This works better than the "skip x seconds" idea others have since some podcasts have mid-show ads, too.
Fascinating, I’ll give that a try, thank you!
I think this would make a good -arr application.
Ingest podcast feeds, crowdsource hashes of whole and partial sections of the downloaded audio, which should be a good start to auto-tag dynamically inserted ads.
For non-dynamic ads, provide an interface to manually identify their start/end, and publish for others. The same interface could be used to add chapters and other metadata.
Then you’d just point your podcast app to an RSS feed you self host.
I propose Listenarr, unless this has already been taken.
Alternatively what you're describing sounds like SponsorBlock but for podcasts. You probably wouldn't have to rehost the actual audio files to accomplish this, just have a podcast client/addon that allows user submissions for ad segments and a database somewhere that can host the metadata for ad breaks.
Biggest issue is probably that you're probably building or forking an existing podcast app to do it, and some podcasts dynamically insert ads so it's possible that peoples downloaded files could have different ad segments/times.
I thought I explained how to handle the dynamically inserted ads, but I’ll elaborate a little here.
If your Listenarr instance is part of a broader network of other instances, they’ll all potentially receive a unique file with different ads inserted, but they’ll typically be inserted at the same cut location in the program timeline. Listenarr would calculate the hash of the entire file, but also sub spans of various lengths.
If the hash of the full file is the same among instances, you know everyone is getting the same file, and any time references suggested for metadata will apply to everyone.
If the full file hash is different, Listenarr starts slicing it up and generating hashes of subsections to help identify where common and variant sections are. Common sections will usually be the actual content, variants are likely tailored ads. The broader the Listenarr network, the greater the sample size for hashes, which will help automate identification. In fact, the more granular and specific the targeting of inserted ads, the easier it will be to identify them.
Once you have the file sections sufficiently hashed, tagged, and identified, you can easily stitch together a sanitised media stream into a file any podcast app can ingest.
You could shove this function into a podcast player, but then you’d need to replicate all the existing permutations of player applications.
The beauty of the current podcast environment is it’s just RSS feeds that point to audio files in a standard way. This permits handling by a shim proxy in the middle of the transaction between the publisher and the player.
This could also be a way to better incorporate media into the fediverse. One example is the chapters and transcripts generated could be directly referenced in Lemmy and Mastodon posts.
I've been looking into sponsorblock-ml for an alternative approach
If the podcast is available on YouTube, Newpipe does the job brilliantly and you even have forks/options to skip sponsor ads too.
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.
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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.
It's not quite the same, but Pocket Casts lets you customize how many seconds the skip buttons go forward and back by, which can at least make it a little less tedious
Antennapod has the same function and many more, and is free(as in beer and freedom)/libre
I can rly recommend it since it doesn't lock features behind a paywall and respects your privacy
Antennapod and newpipe are the biggest apps I’ve missed since moving to iOS
I'll have to look into that. I switched to Pocket Casts years ago specifically for the cross-platform sync feature, and haven't really given it any thought since lol
Only on YouTube but it's crowdsourced. SponsorBlock for ReVanced is the only way to watch for me.
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.
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
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.
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.
If it's on YouTube, then Sponsorblock will work on it as well. (Given someone has marked the sections, which is almost always)
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.
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.
i use YouTube Music Revanced and I've never gotten any ads for my podcasts
I think OP is talking about integrated ads edited into the podcast, not the ones YouTube or other apps serve to pay for hosting the content
Newpipe w/ sponsor block enabled (on fdroid)
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