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.
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.