Decided to get back into podcasts recently, but baked-in ads and sponsor reads make standard listening unbearable.

I spent the weekend spinning up MinusPod, an open-source tool that detects ad reads and strips them using ffmpeg. It uses Whisper for local transcription, then feeds the transcript to an LLM to identify exact timestamps for sponsor segments and commercial breaks before slicing them out. I routed the text processing through Gemini Flash, which runs about $0.07 per episode. Clean, ad-free audio feeds with zero manual editing.