alt Hacker NewsI gave up on podcasts because of the excessive insertion of commercials, and the execrable user interface of the iphone podcast app.
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elAhmo • today at 5:42 PM
There are other apps too, such as Overcast, and ads on podcasts are really easy to skip.
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This is a frustration for me as well. A few useful tricks, and some areas I'm looking to explore:
- AntennaPod (Android: https://antennapod.org/about/) doesn't specifically block ads, but does make skipping them fairly painless. I'm not familiar with the iOS app space.
- Seek out, and add a classification tag for ad-free podcasts. When you're not in the mood for dealing with ads, play these.
- Protip: if you learn, or want to learn, German, Deutschlandfunk (and a number of other German-language broadcasters) have a set of excellent, ad-free, podcasts. This includes a number of podcasts for learning German (generally through the Goethe Institute or Deutsche Welle).
- If your podcast app permits it, set your forward-skip to 30 or 60 seconds (the length of most ad beds), and backwards to 5 seconds. You'll be able to navigate past most ad blocks more easily. You can also set begin/end skip periods for start/end of episode advertising.
- I've thought of manually editing episodes from a desktop session using audio editing software (Audacity or similar). That's ... a bit of additional overhead, but as with other mise en place techniques, you incur the overhead once and don't have to worry about the interruptions when you're in the middle of listening to an episode. Audacity shows sound signatures and I'm expecting that most ad blocks will be readily apparent. I also suspect AI tools might be able to remove ads fairly reliably, though haven't looked into this yet.
I've definitely noticed that I deliberately avoid listening to podcasts which have ads when I don't have the bandwidth / freedom to deal with them (e.g., doing other tasks, walking etc.). And advertising has become more pervasive, longer, more intrusively inserted, and annoying with time.
Other ad-free English-language pods: Tech Can't Save Us, History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps), and Philosophy Bites (and several affiliated podcasts). All are highly informative, well-produced, don't fixate on current events and politics (which ... I find maddening). And several of those would appreciate any support as well.