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.
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Podcasts are just a RSS feed with an mp3 downloas link. It’s trivial to open the RSS feed in your browser and locate the mp3 download link. Download the mp3, open it in any audio editor, edit out the ad. Or find the folder where your podcast app stores the mp3s and edit them from there.
Personally, I’m OK with podcast ads as there’s limited opportunity for tracking or personalization. If we don’t encorage podcasts to remain as an open platform, they will be swallowed up by Spotify.
If you’re pulling from YouTube I think yt-dlp has the option to cut and stitch videos back together with sponsorblock (not default option). Maybe you could use -f m4a with that option, idk.
I read an explanation on reddit why it doesn’t exist for audio platforms, basically it’s against TOS and your app will lose API access, never looked into it further tho.
If someone knows if this is possible please let me know too.
Excellent, I was not aware of this. Most of the podcasts in YT form have sponsorblock entries. And yt-dlp has an easy command:
–sponsorblock-remove Category
Interesting feature from ytdlp. Another reason why sponsor block might not be feasable for podcasts are inidividualized advertisements. There are few podcasts which e.g. have different ads depending for which country you are coming from. So going just by timecodes isnt an option.
I think most of the nerds that might be able to strip inline ads would prefer to support (or at least appear to support) podcast producers and so wouldn’t have much interest in developing said app.
Also, stripping ads isn’t an easy problem given how unpredictable they can be. Some podcasts ads are read live by the same voices presenting the podcast without skipping a beat (particularly common with a popular DnD podcast).
The more practical solution is to use a player that lets you set distinct skip intervals for skipping forward and back. For example on my podcast app, when I skip forward it jumps 30 seconds ahead, but when I skip backwards it only jumps 10 seconds. That means I can jump ahead in roughly commercial length intervals until I no longer hear the ads, but if I’ve gone just a little too far then skipping back once or twice usually gets me close enough to the start of real content again. If you rely on an app to strip the ads, you’re practically guaranteed to remove some actual content, you’ve already put more effort into avoiding the ads than I have just hitting skip once or twice, and if you’ve removed content that you want to hear then you’ve got to go back to the original podcast and listen through the ads anyway. Why bother? Podcasts aren’t like YouTube where a third party is inserting the ads in random obnoxious places that interrupt the narrative or musical flow. Are they?
Auto injected context-aware ads are becoming increasingly common these days. Lots of podcast providers will use your IP or user information (if available) to select ads for your area or personal data and and they’ll splice it into your download. It almost always interrupts the flow of discussions but the ones I’ve heard are at least usually good enough to happen at the end of sentences and not mid sentence or mid word.
I’ll have to take your word for that. I’ve never encountered such a thing in any of my podcasts. That sounds like a technical possibility in theory, but a practical fantasy given the way most podcasts are distributed.
@PolarisFx AntennaPod (if you’re on Android) can batch download all of a podcast’s episode. Then you can edit the files to trim them and remove the ad part.
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I have considered dling via yt to make use of sponsor block as you suggest. Does it work?
Podcasts are extremely neglected in this general area. Few torrents exist. They are at high risk of disappearing off the internet forever because they cost a lot to keep hosted while producing zero revenue. Archiving is not happening as far as I know.
Add removal would be great. TIP if you use a VPN you might gets ads targeted to that country. Which in some cases is actually no ads. Hop around and see if you can kind the right one. It’ll be different per distributor.
Yes, it works quite well. I found a playlist of all the episodes I was looking for, every file I looked at had sponsor block segments (should’ve kept looking as the newer files didn’t have them) and set it to download the entire playlist. It checks the api and removes any segments that it finds, extracts the audio and reencodes to mp3. Sounds great.
Is it Shitical Holl?
It’s “Tales From The Stinky Dragon” which is a Rooster Teeth podcast. I thought they’d have full files on Patreon and I could just use kemono to get access to them, but they have their own app and shit.