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.
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.