I wanted to listen to the Otherworld podcast, but the first thing I hear is an ad localized for my IP-region. My instant reaction to those is to immediately hit pause and stop listening. I looked at their patreon and it has less posts than there are episodes, so I assume you can’t even get ad free episodes from there.
Is there some way to filter ads out of podcasts, or a site that has feeds for podcasts with the ads cut out?
I’ve done some thinking on this. They do seem to be pretty consistent with the placement of the ads (right at the beginning for exactly x seconds or a consistent offset into the show). It shouldnt be terribly hard to write something that detects them and cuts them out of the final audio file, or in the worst case acts like sponsorblock on youtube and crowsources the ad timestamps. But I dont regularly listen to any podcasts that do that garbage so I never pursued it past the conceptual stage
Most have an outro/intro as well when coming back from ad break. Should be able to analyze the audio for those segments with some fair bit of confidence and place cuts.
Obviously won’t work on the fly but it could be done. I just skip the ads instead, but who knows if it will be a Black Mirror style future where you have to hear the ads.