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Comment by JamesBaxter | Hacker News Reader

I probably wouldn't use this as I would feel bad about it but as a UK listener I've listened to SO MANY adverts from American podcasts for products I can't buy.

I pay for stitcher premium and export the feed to an app that's actually useable.

I recently paid to support Thrilling Adventure Hour on patreon and find it pretty crappy they still have adverts on the paid feed.

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> I recently paid to support Thrilling Adventure Hour on patreon and find it pretty crappy they still have adverts on the paid feed.

Is there any way to discover ad-free podcasts, paid or not?

I've essentially abandoned podcasts because of my annoyance with ads, and have instead been paying for audiobooks.

I remember listening to a podcast (can't remember the name) but the adverts were tailored to my location.

I think the MP3 gets generated based on location.

I've seen this too. A politics podcast I listen to on Spotify played me some targeted get-out-the-vote messaging about my local & state races in November. I'm assuming Spotify provides them that data via customer's billing addresses. Or maybe they get it from location sharing via Waze (which has Spotify integration).

I also did hear American ads when listening to a foreign podcast in a non-English language.

It seems like the ads are added to the audio file at the start and the end of the podcast.

(I use Player FM)

A lot of audio ad broadcast software uses a combination of audible or inaudible tones to act as "triggers" to mark a location where an ad can be injected using some kind of location/time/etc aware data, the ad itself is very rarely baked into the stream unless it is something you're listening to a host read themselves.

In podcasts, the ad injection software will often pause the audio at the point where the ad tone occurred while it plays the ad, and resume it afterwards for continuity.

AdSwizz's AIS suite is one example of the tools commonly used for this: https://www.adswizz.com/ad-insertion-suite/

(I work in the internet radio space, lots of old-school internet radio streams are similar).

Similar to Cue Mark [0]

I remember my dad pointing this out many years ago on ITV in the UK.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_mark

How does this work with a typical podcast player? The media download is typically just an mp3. The podcast software maker would have to be in on the scam otherwise it's an mp3 that plays from beginning to end.

If you're just downloading an MP3, there isn't any kind of ad injection going on.

Ad injection would apply if you were using your favorite podcast network's app, webplayer, etc.

Ads in a plain MP3 are "baked in"

When your player requests the mp3 file in this example the server on the fly can generate an mp3 file that your player then downloads. This means that they can serve different ads in old podcast episodes or even remove them in old episodes.

I heard about this tech on a podcast actually.

An MP3 files is mostly a collection of encoded frames. You can just concatenate them.

Podcasts without chapter marks should be deleted.

Why downvote? Chapter marks are a must-have.

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