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.
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.