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.
Really? I know they used to be an RSS feed where you could search for the mp3 name. I find it is a lot harder nowadays because the actual name is hidden via css.
They all want user stats which is what they get when we use an app to access the feed.
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.
@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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
