It should be doable to so some audio analysis of the episodes. They “always” (I am sure some forget every now and then), have an outro and intro around the ad block. With a clearly defined jingle per podcast. You should be able to make a program that analyses the audio and listens for that block and cuts it out for you.
Comment on How I use Pinchflat to avoid podcast ads
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 10 months ago
But there’s a lot of podcasts, especially from sources like IHeartRadio, that have scads of annoying ads
And they’re so repetitive. And each block is the same length if I’m not mistaken. This could even be automated - not relying on human input - or at least half-automated.
Tanoh@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 10 months ago
Yep. Certain patterns are easily recognizable even by machines. One could have a relatively simple “IHeartRadio algorithm” that should work 99% of the time (esp. with Ed Zitron who brackets the blocks with that insane guitar riff).
Hell, I could even write that with ffmpeg and a shell script.
OK I’m being arrogant now, but not wrong.
ikidd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I had found one that used Whisper to convert the podcast to text and then ran it through an AI to find the ad text, but I couldn’t get it to work. I had considered building something myself and was about halfway through that when I found this method. It does the job better than I think an AI would considering it’s crowdsourced for the ad identification.
Legume5534@lemm.ee 10 months ago
This is exactly the route I’ve been begging for for years now. It seriously should be doable.
SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’ve had a pipeline in mind for exactly this purpose that I want to build when I get around to it:
In theory, this should be able to remove ad and sponsor sections of any length completely automatically and there’s nothing to stop it working on videos too