This is a small app that achieves surprisingly good podcast adblocking. It transcribes the podcast, identifies ad segments in the transcript, then creates a new version of the podcast without the ads.
This is something I would use - not to steal but so I could listen to certain podcasts for sleep. The host intros and ads for this certain podcast are terribly distracting from what is otherwise incredible content.
The code is surprisingly short and compact. It looks as if if the classification could be adapted to extract "highlight" snippets from podcasts as well, which would be a usecase I would be interested in.
Alternative using SponsorBlock for podcasts on YouTube/Vimeo:<p><a href="https://github.com/mxpv/podsync">https://github.com/mxpv/podsync</a>
If this uses pydub which uses ffmpeg under-the-hood, I guess it re-encodes the .mp3s rather than "losslessly" snipping out frames of audio without re-encoding?
This is interesting as a technical PoC but also feels a bit unethical.<p>The moral case for ad blocking on the web seems pretty clear: online advertising is built on massive exploitation of user privacy, has horrible UX, and is often implemented so poorly that it tanks pageload performance. In short, I understand why people use ad blockers on the web.<p>Podcasts though? In RSS-based podcasting, which is what this tool targets, you're typically getting a reasonable quality audio ad, with limited tracking, targeted broadly at the category of people who might listen to a particular podcast; it's about as unobtrusive as advertising gets. Widespread circumvention of those ads could really hurt the ecosystem, which would be particularity frustrating given that podcasting appears to still be a viable space for small scale creators to do great things (e.g. San Charrington and the TWIML AI podcast)<p>TLDR cool demo but everyone should please think carefully about if or when to use this tool.
Why do so many comments see not listening to / viewing ads as immoral?<p>Even if this will become the new norm, and there are fewer advertisers and people would make less money from it, this change could be very positive for the podcast ecosystem. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and the majority are without ads or rarely include ads. They are products of passion, and not full of fake testimonials about scammy expensive multivitamins or really bad mental health services.<p>Imho, the web was a lot better before Google and social media ruined the discoverability of small personal websites and blogs with great content, and replaced it with (nowadays AI-generated) blogspam and clickbait that is highly profitable, but ultimately worthless.<p>We will not return to the good old times with the web. In fact I believe that the genie is not only out of the bottle, but we actually created an automated Pandora's-box-opener in the current state of AI, compete with endless unboxing videos. But maybe we can go one step back with podcasts. I believe it would be worth a try.