Show HN: Adblock for Podcasts

https://github.com/jdrbc/podly_pure_podcasts

by jdr23bc • 2 years ago

89 67 2 years ago

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.

clay_the_ripper• 2 years ago

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.

maxglute• 2 years ago

I'm hoping now that Google Podcast moved to Youtube Music which can be added to Youtube Playlist, podcast listeners are going to figure out sponsorblock applies. I wonder if that's also why a bunch of my podcasts haven't migrated to Youtube.

davesmylie• 2 years ago

Other use case is relistening to old podcasts - about half the stuff I listen to is historical which lends itself well to a relistening 10 years later. The content may well be still relevant but the ads are surely not.

The other podcasts I listen to are current and mostly ad supported - this isn't great for them

vsnf2• 2 years ago

Right now someone, somewhere, is thinking of a way to use this to identify the ad portions in old podcasts and overlay new, perpetually relevant, dynamic ads.

Larrikin• 2 years ago

Not listening to ads is never stealing

coryfklein• 2 years ago

Right? Every player comes with those "skip forward 30s" buttons, and surely the creators and advertisers are aware that many folks tap that button anyway.

mgrandl• 2 years ago

That is awesome! I will give it a shot :)

pixelesque• 2 years ago

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?

jdr23bc3• 2 years ago

That's right. Also adds a fade on the ad transitions. I haven't noticed a drop in quality.

camelcat2• 2 years ago

This is great! I'd love this to be integrated into my podcast app (AntennaPod) just like Sponsorblock for YouTube.

longitudinal93• 2 years ago

Thank you for AntennaPod. It's a wonderful app.

occz• 2 years ago

I'm not sure they actually claimed to be the author - I read it as them claiming to be a user.

camelcat2• 2 years ago

Thank you for your kind words, but I'm just an enthusiastic user of the app, not the author.

interblag2• 2 years ago

This is interesting as a technical PoC but also feels a bit unethical.

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.

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)

TLDR cool demo but everyone should please think carefully about if or when to use this tool.

panarky• 2 years ago

Is it unethical to fast-forward through ads?

How about if I turn the volume down during ads, is that morally wrong?

Maybe I play ads at regular speed and volume, but I think about something other than the ads while they play, is that wrong?

Perhaps a truly ethical consumer would listen intently to every ad, rewinding every time their mind wanders, pausing the audio every few seconds to take copious notes.

jjayj4• 2 years ago

This is a space in which I still haven't fully formed an opinion (as I typed this response I realized I have an opinion, I'm just not totally sure what it is) so I welcome discussion. I hate advertising too, and use e.g. Sponsor Block, but I recognize that the majority of the modern internet would not exist without ads.

if I turn the volume down during ads, is that morally wrong?

30 years ago, was it morally wrong to go to the bathroom during an ad break? (IMO: no)

I think about something other than the ads while they play, is that wrong?

30 years ago, was it wrong to chat with friends during a commercial break? (IMO: no)

That being said, _skipping_ the ads entirely doesn't seem (to me) equivalent to these examples.

I cannot explain why I feel this way. I _think_ I still believe in _unobtrusive_ advertising - 5 to 15 seconds of ads before a 10 minute video.

If the author of our favorite podcast can't get any product placement in, why will they continue producing the podcast? (Maybe in a utopia they would create the podcast because that's what they love to do - but maybe in a utopia they would prefer not to cast, and instead listen to someone else?)

Idk. Some thought vomit here that maybe HN folks can help me work through.

interblag2• 2 years ago

This sounds a bit like the fallacy of the beard; the existence of ambiguous behaviours that exist somewhere on the spectrum between "listening to an entire podcast with ads" and "automatically downloading the podcast, editing out the ads, and reuploading to a personal RSS feed so you can listen to it ad-free" shouldn't prevent us from contrasting the behaviours at the extreme ends of the spectrum.

That said, "unethical" was clearly a poor choice of words, as that's quite a loaded term. However, this technology is designed to systematically circumvent the mechanism by which many podcast creators earn money for their effort, and even if "unethical" is the wrong word, we should still discuss whether putting these technologies out, and using them, is a good move - particularly if we care about rewarding creators and supporting the podcasting industry. (And there's an argument that goes even further, around whether doing something like this is systematically violating an implicit contract with creators, even if it's more of a moral contract than a legal one).

portaouflop• 2 years ago

I get your point but removing advertising is never unethical.

pixxel• 2 years ago

Advertising doesn’t work on me. I fast-forward through ads. I never sit and listen to them. Ever. Am I unethical?

askl• 2 years ago

Does it matter if I actually listen to the ad if there isn't anything that's tracking if I do? It shouldn't hurt the podcasters revenue.

I'm not getting a hellofresh subscription anyways even if I hear an ad for it.

jjayj4• 2 years ago

My completely ignorant and uninformed opinion:

If the vast majority of folks started skipping ads, and ads thus no longer had reasonable conversion rates, companies would stop investing in podcast ads and many podcasts would stop being produced.

asymmetric• 2 years ago

with limited tracking, targeted broadly at the category of people who might listen to a particular podcast

Not so fast. Many podcasts are served by intermediaries. The same intermediary can then observe and collect an individual's listener preferences and create a more targeted profile.

The iOS podcast app Overcast shows you all the intermediary platforms a podcast goes through.

E.g. 99pi goes through Chartable, with Overcast flagging that it "may follow individual-listener behaviour across multiple shows or the web, often to track responses to ads.'

Terr_2• 2 years ago

The moral case for ad blocking on the web seems pretty clear

Also ad-networks as an unaccountable vector for malware.

That said, I agree that audio in a podcast doesn't have that same problem, outside of a Snow Crash scenario.

phito2• 2 years ago

Ads are unethical.

cess11• 2 years ago

Do you have other feelings that you consider important enough that they should cause me to think carefully about something?

If your media contains parts that you needed to be convinced by money to insert I'll probably skip it entirely, for me it's a signal that the material is produced for other reasons than your interests and passion, and there are many other people that don't make such compromises. Some of them put a price on the material, some don't. I might be willing to make a deal with you, but I do not want to be pulled into your deals with third parties.

noirscape2• 2 years ago

I'd say the easiest comparison is that it'd be about as ethical as taking a VHS recording of a TV program and skipping through the old ad breaks.

Personally I don't see an issue with that; but even if you do, I'll also note that the overwhelming majority of companies that rely on Podcast/influencer ads in general have utter shite quality products. It's one thing to get a traditional radio ad break telling you about the current supermarket sales, it's another to hear the fiftieth VPN ad who is totally about convincing you that they're just for watching Netflix overseas, the twentieth food delivery company, bad earbuds manufacturers or shite like razor delivery companies and cast iron BBQ grills. To put it quite simply; there's a reason these companies aren't pursuing more traditional avenues and it's probably because they'd get undesired scrutiny if they did.

There are of course outliers, but the amount of false advertising for shoddy products compared to actually desirable shit is so low that the bar is below the floor.

jdr23bc3• 2 years ago

Good points! I agree using this to bypass a reasonable paid ad-free option is dubious.

In Canada the CBC's tax-funded podcasts with ads also feel a little dubious.

It'd be cool if you could have an personal AI purchase and curate content for you.

Edit: thinking a bit more about it I guess that's pretty much what YouTube premium is.

Animats• 2 years ago

Is there one for videos?

jjayj4• 2 years ago

Sponsor Block for YouTube videos.

wruza2• 2 years ago

I find SB reporters sometimes too eager and even flagged some skips due to an incorrect category. Not that it’s a mass issue, but it has to be worked on.

Otherwise it’s fantastic.

(SB has different categories of skips. E.g. sponsor ads, self promotion/merch, like-sub-bell annoyances and so on. You choose what you skip.)

nolongerthere• 2 years ago

How intensive is this to run? Could it be set to run automatically for each new podcast that gets added to the original feed?

jdr23bc3• 2 years ago

On an M3 15 minutes of podcasts takes about 1 minute of processing. The transcription is the slow part.

smcleod• 2 years ago

Nice work, I've raised a PR that adds support for local LLMs (Ollama, llama.cpp etc...) and a few other enhancements.

draugadrotten• 2 years ago

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.

shoulderfake• 2 years ago

gods work

fnordian_slip• 2 years ago

Why do so many comments see not listening to / viewing ads as immoral?

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.

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.

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.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

I don't get it. You want the podcast, you value the work, you don't want them paid?

klunger• 2 years ago

Exactly. If you are going to use this, I believe you should also become a patron* of the podcasts you do it to. And, in that case, you often have access to an ad-free version anyway.

*or "tip" or whatever other monetization channel they have. Very few rely solely on ads.

pragmatick• 2 years ago

Why wouldn't they get paid? You download the whole episode, it's not different than downloading it to your phone. They don't know if you listened to the ad any more than if listening via an app without this step inbetween.

noirscape2• 2 years ago

Sponsorship money is to my understanding pretty much always paid beforehand; the marketer gives a sum of money and just for doing the ad read, the podcaster gets paid.

Actual payment on clickthrough/conversion rate is pretty uncommon. The podcaster isn't harmed by anyone skipping the ads.

rPlayer6554• 2 years ago

The more people that use this, the less that ads will be worth.

shortformblog3• 2 years ago

Ding ding ding.

A lot of podcast authors offer ad-free versions as a paid feed to members, which to me, invalidates the ethically dubious “but the podcaster has already been paid” argument.

They should be given the choice to do this.

I feel like the slippery slope is immensely dangerous as it always is with these products.

skeaker2• 2 years ago

How do you feel about just fast forwarding past the ads in your audio player? Is that unethical too?

INTPenis• 2 years ago

I wish there was a reality where content creators understood that ads just don't work on some people. I understand that they need money, and I listen to the ads when I can't fast-forward through them, but it's a complete waste of time on me.

And I do have a desire to block ads in every single part of my life, I just don't practically go any further than regular uBlock origin in Firefox.

I'd actually rather pay for good podcasts than get intrusive ads.

AlexeyBelov3• 2 years ago

Don't they have a day job?

creativenolo• 2 years ago

A docker image for running on a server/homelab would be super.

0x2a3• 2 years ago

Alternative using SponsorBlock for podcasts on YouTube/Vimeo:

https://github.com/mxpv/podsync

0x2a3• 2 years ago

Another more recent one (on-demand instead of upfront downloads):

https://github.com/ericmedina024/podcast-sponsor-block

xcavier• 2 years ago

Just the other day I was wishing there was a uBlock but for podcasts...

Show HN: Adblock for Podcasts

Related Stories