← Podcast Editors Mastermind
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- [00:00]
Steve Stewart
Are you self employed and get your insurance through the marketplace? If so, you need to know about the subsidy cliff. This is a change to the tax law in 2026. It's actually the expiration of some benefits to people and if you are not aware of it, you need to know about this. I'm going to be doing a live webinar Tuesday, Aug. 4 at 3pm Eastern, 12 noon Pacific. Please adjust for your time zone with Sean Mullaney, an advice only financial advisor. We're going to go through at least 12 different ways that you can control your income to legally avoid the subsidy cliff. I'm facing a $24,000 tax penalty if I don't do this right. You know, I'm taking notes already and I'm going to be prepared to not pay that tax penalty and I'm hoping to save you a lot of headache as well. I'll be sending reminders through the Podcast Editor Industry Newsletter and if you're not signed up for the newsletter, go do that now. It's podcasteditoracademy.com Newsletter podcasteditoracademy.com newsletter
- [00:56]
Daniel J. Lewis
will give
- [00:56]
Steve Stewart
you reminders of the upcoming webinar. Tuesday, August 4th at 3:00pm Eastern, 12 Pacific. Please adjust for your time zone. This might be the most important webinar I have ever done and I'm hoping to save a lot of people, a lot of self employed people who are getting health insurance through the government, a lot of headache and a lot of money. Podcast.com Newsletter to stay in touch and I'll see you there. Welcome to the Podcast Editor Mastermind Show. I am Steve, now improved with free AI transcription Stuart and and with me today is the incredible luminary of podcasting and inductee of the Podcast hall of Fame, Daniel J. Lewis.
- [01:30]
Daniel J. Lewis
Welcome to the show, Steve. It's great to talk with you.
- [01:33]
Steve Stewart
You have been in the space a long time. Anybody who's watching this or listening to this should know about the Audacity Podcast. You started that back in 2009.
- [01:42]
Daniel J. Lewis
2010.
- [01:43]
Steve Stewart
2010 and you had a show before that. Even so, you've been in the space a long time. You have developed some products and the one I remember most fondly because it was one of the first things you ever built is the social subscribe and follow plugin and podgagement. So I thought you'd be the perfect person to come on and talk about a somewhat technical thing that everybody's talking about today, which is chapters in podcast episodes. Chapters have been around a long time though, haven't they.
- [02:10]
Daniel J. Lewis
Oh, yeah, yeah. Way back, even in the early days of podcasting, when we only had itunes and you would see some people publish podcasts as enhanced aac. Because back then, that was the only way you could get Chapters was by publishing an Enhanced AAC. But now MP3 supports it, too, and many of the podcast apps support the chapters inside the MP3 files. But, yeah, we've had the chapters since the beginning, since as long as I can remember.
- [02:37]
Steve Stewart
What happened to cause MP3s to be able to provide chapters built into the MP3 like that is today?
- [02:43]
Daniel J. Lewis
It's the metadata. And that's the thing that is the chapters are essentially part of the ID3 tags inside of the MP3, it's stored a little bit differently, but just for the sake of keeping it simple and not getting too technical, it's basically there with the ID3 tags. And that's all just metadata at the very top of the file. So it's not buried near the bottom. It's not spaced throughout. Wherever the audio is, it's up near the top. It's metadata. And people have been able to put different pieces of metadata in there, and just a standard came out that would be able to support the chapters inside of that metadata. And then a lot of apps and services started supporting that.
- [03:21]
Steve Stewart
Yeah, because I remember many, many years ago, podcasts like you were talking about, aac, they had the chapters, they had the images, too, changing because they were music podcasts. There were mixes, hot mixes, people doing trance music and stuff. And I thought it was cool, but it was a lot of work. Now it's a little bit easier, but it's still a lot of work. But I think we'll find people a shortcut they can use here a little bit. But, oh, yeah, Chapters now is just. Everybody's talking about them. It seems like, you know, if Apple sneezes, everybody talks about it. Spotify does things, everybody complains about it. Actually, Spotify beat Apple to the punch this time, including automated transcripts and automated chapters through their apps, but through their apps only. But I've not actually been a fan of Chapters. Is Chapters actually a good thing for podcasts?
- [04:06]
Daniel J. Lewis
I think so. Now, just to make sure that we're all on the same playing field, and I know the kind of audience that you have, so I just want to make sure that we know our terms, what a chapter is. It is a mark in the audio at a certain time, and that must have a title with it in addition to that title at a certain time in the audio. It can also optionally contain one or both of these, an image and. Or a link. Podcasting 2.0 actually adds on top of that, a couple of other features to that, like a location for that chapter, and also the ability to hide that chapter from the table of contents. But so what we're talking about is dividing the audio up at specific times. And the way that most podcast apps interpret a single chapter is, even if the chapter has simply a start point, is everything from that start point until either the end of the episode or the next chapter, whichever comes first, that's the chapter length. So if you have three chapters, you don't have to worry about setting the end range of each chapter. You just set the start point of each chapter, and so it helps divide up the audio in different ways. So is this a good thing to do? Is basically your question to break it up? Yeah, I think so. Because a lot of podcasts naturally have some kind of structure to them. An outline, certain segments. Just think of it this way. You see public speakers and preachers and people like that who follow an outline while they're speaking, and they're on point one, point, two, point three, and so on. Those outline points can be chapters, and that allows your audience a few things. And I'll use the phrase your audience, even though I know I'm talking to podcast editors, but it's just easier to say your audience. Your audience can look at the chapters to see an outline of your episode, and that allows them to more easily follow along with the content, to know what's coming, to know what you've already said, to even know the immediate context of where they are. Like most of the podcast apps that display chapters, and that is a lot of them, they will display the title of the current chapter. A simple tap or swipe, and you can get to the list of all the chapters, but you can see what that current chapter is. Steve, has this ever happened to you, that you've been listening to a podcast and. And you got a little distracted and forgot what they were talking about all the time? A chapter can help remind you what they're talking about. So if someone is sharing the five secrets of success and they're on a certain point and you're thinking, wait a minute, what point are we on? Are we on two? Did I miss two? Are we on three? I don't know. Or just look down, and if they've put in chapters, you can see you're on number three, and then you can follow along more easily. It makes it more engaging, more memorable, more easily to follow it also presents the opportunities to do more engaging things like adding those links and the images that we'll get into more later on. But just think of chapters as a way of making your content more engaging, more even interactive, even though it's only audio.
- [07:10]
Steve Stewart
As far as the skipping back, as I was distracted, I mean, I can just skip back 30 seconds a few times until I figure out where I was when I stopped paying attention. And I like the summary in the show notes, which also helps with SEO, you know, with Google searches and stuff. When it's in a blog post, it's pretty much the same thing I use inside of a Show notes document for my clients. But now with the chapters, and you're saying, you know, the. We'll say they're action chapters or something like that, where it's actually going to do something rather than just being a list of topics with some timestamps listed, which. Some apps, that's the way they still show them. But some of these really powerful apps like Apple, Spotify, Pocket, Cast now actually have jumpable links or, you know, the timestamps become jump links, where it goes right to the place. Or there's a feature like in overcast, if anybody's used overcast, they know what I'm talking about. But again, I go back to is this a good thing? Because I've got clients who have dynamic ad insertion or even baked in ads, and the chapters allow people to skip those ads. And when people skip ads, they're not hearing them. If they're not hearing them, they can't take action. Or the people who are annoyed by ads, or the third ad, they know how to hit skip, go right to the next chapter again, making the ads less impactful. And the podcaster is trying to make money on the ads, then they're going to lose some favor with the advertisers that way. What do you say about that?
- [08:28]
Daniel J. Lewis
I like this objection because it allows me to rebut it. Here's an objection that your clients might raise for you. Okay. Besides ads, even if they don't have ads, they might think, wait, if I give my audience the ability to skip my content, they might skip my content. That's actually a good thing. Here's how you can respond to that. Because it means the audience can get the content they want more conveniently from you, your podcaster client. That is, they get the content they want from the podcaster instead of getting frustrated, abandoning the podcast and going somewhere else. So, yes, you're giving them the ability to skip around, but that can Actually be a good thing, because wouldn't you so much rather they get the content from your client than get frustrated and leave?
- [09:23]
Steve Stewart
Yes, I cannot debate that.
- [09:26]
Daniel J. Lewis
So the way that you've described it, let's assume someone is following an outline for their show. They've got five basic points, and they put an ad between points three and four. So, yes, someone could be listening to point three, and then they hear that you've got an ad playing, and then they decide to just skip and jump straight to point four. That is a way to do it. And yeah, that does skip it. But before you think about the potential of their skipping the ad, think about how you can make the ad more actionable. Actually, by giving it a chapter. So you give a chapter to that ad for as long as the ad is there, that chapter can have an image. So you display an image that's relevant to that call to action. Whatever the call to action is for, whether it's a sponsor product, you're talking about something you're recommending. So now it's more engaging that way people see what you're talking about, which creates more retention for them. Even if they're skipping it, they might see. Still you can also add a link to that chapter. So if they are interested in that thing that you're talking about, they don't have to type in a URL, they can just tap on the link from the chapter. So the chapters make your ads better. Actually, yes, there's the potential for people to skip the ads. But you mentioned earlier being able to skip back 30 seconds or so if you forgot something. Well, people can skip forward just as easily if they don't want to hear an ad. So the skipping is already happening and you're making it just a tiny bit easier for them if you use a chapter immediately after the ad. Now, I say if there, because there's another way that you could approach this. Going back to the outline example, instead of putting your ad between points three and four, consider putting it inside of point three. So there is content from point three before the ad, and there's content from point three after the ad. And this, of course, depends on how you present your content and how you've prepared it to be able to accept an ad. But when you do this, you can do a couple cool things with chapters, especially podcasting 2.0 chapters, which are the new modern standard that Apple podcasts supports. They don't support this specific little feature, but some apps do this. That is the toggle for table of contents. So right now, when you create your chapters, they are creating a table of contents for your episode. Podcasting 2.0 added two additional features onto chapters. That is that you can add a location with a chapter, and you can also add a table of contents Switch. If you say that a particular chapter will not display in the table of contents, well, that means it won't display in the table of contents. That also means that it is not something that you can skip to because it's not considered part of the table of contents. So where this comes in with these ads is you're in point three, and you have a chapter for the beginning of point three. You can make another chapter for the middle of point three, where you have your ad and it has the image that's relevant to the ad, it has the URL as part of that chapter. So it's all actionable for that ad, but its table of contents is turned off so it doesn't appear in the table of contents. And then after that, you can have another chapter that's the same as what your number three was. So it's kind of going back to number three. But you do have to place a new chapter. But that new chapter, you've also told it to be table of contents false. If you look at the table of contents or the outline from a chapter perspective, all you'll see is points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You won't see two chapters for point 3, you'll just see one. You won't see the chapter for the ad, you'll just see the chapter for three. This is a way of being able to switch the image and the link and the title at a particular time without it having to affect that table of contents and the skippability. And then you just are returning them back to the chapter like they were on just before that.
- [13:35]
Steve Stewart
I'm trying to envision how to do that in certain media hosts, and I don't know how to do that. Like Captivate or Libsyn.
- [13:42]
Daniel J. Lewis
Libsyn. Let's kind of leave them out of this conversation because they don't support a lot of the podcasting 2.0 things. But any system that supports podcasting 2.0, check to see if they support the table of contents feature for the chapter. It might also be called toc, which stands for Table of Contents. Like my own app, POD Chapters, when you create a chapter in it, there is this toggle that you can hide a chapter from the table of contents. The assumption is any chapter you create will be in the table of contents. This hiding feature, unfortunately isn't supported by the legacy chapters inside MP3 files that metadata. But as more and more apps are starting to switch over to supporting the podcasting 2.0 chapters, that unlocks these better abilities, like this table of contents thing.
- [14:34]
Steve Stewart
So I have to ask then, where am I hiding the table of contents if I'm uploading it to. Let's say I've got clients with Megaphone, they got the campaigns and then you just hit a marker where you're going to put the ads dynamically inserted and then we've got the list of chapters from, you know, the original file without the ads. Where am I hiding the table contents? Am I able to do that with Megaphone or is it certain media hosts that allow me to do that?
- [14:57]
Daniel J. Lewis
Certain media hosts and certain publishing tools. And unfortunately some media hosts even in that currently, at the time of this recording, that includes megaphone and art 19, they don't even support chapters at all in any format. If you upload a file that has chapters in it, their system will end up stripping the chapters out.
- [15:15]
Steve Stewart
Oh, they do, yeah, that's right.
- [15:17]
Daniel J. Lewis
That's really frustrating. So if you work with the, these commercial, these top level, high end art 19 megaphone type of podcast hosting providers, please ask them nicely to support podcasting 2.0 chapters and also all the other podcasting 2.0 features. But other systems like you look at Buzzsprout for example, they do this pretty smartly where if you use their dynamic content insertion feature, they will shift the chapters and the transcript around for you so that if you insert a 30 second ad or a 90 second ad, then all the chapters after that will be appropriately updated and shifted 30 or 90 seconds so the timings still match up correctly.
- [15:59]
Steve Stewart
And is that if I. Okay, we get in a technical. Well, we've been technical for 10 minutes now. So there's the. Adding a list of timestamps with the show notes, all the description inside there, and some of those are jumpable. Yeah, there's the ones like Captivate, where you actually can create a chapter like a timestamp marker and that will then insert that into the RSS feed. Or is that going to go into the MP3 or both?
- [16:25]
Daniel J. Lewis
Both, because there are multiple standards for how chapters are saved, but the two most popular are, I call them legacy MP3 chapters or just MP3 chapters. They're embedded in the metadata of the MP3 file. So if you want to change those chapters, you have to replace the MP3 file, which that means either re uploading it or the system hosting it has to manage that. The other chapter format is podcasting 2.0, which is linked from the RSS feed. But the chapters live in a separate file which is in JSON format, which is a particular data format that's pretty easy to read. I'd say it's actually easier to read than RSS is. But then what that is great about is because it's in a separate file, that means you can update those chapters without having to update the MP3 file.
- [17:11]
Steve Stewart
Seems like there's a lot of different ways of doing this.
- [17:13]
Daniel J. Lewis
There are.
- [17:15]
Steve Stewart
Maybe we should go through some of that. Well, let me go through the. I've got a list of questions and we've been talking. Let's just keep going with this conversation because I'm getting a lot of it and hopefully the people who are listening and watching this are as well. Is there an issue with allowing Apple and Spotify to create those automated chapters for us? Do you see any downside to that?
- [17:35]
Daniel J. Lewis
There are a couple potential downsides. One is anytime something else is doing automated stuff with your audio, there's the chance that they'll get it wrong. That could mean incorrect spelling, it could mean just missing the point altogether. It really depends on how these systems are built. And there are other tools out there that allow you to create the chapters using certain AI powered tools and such like Buzzsprout and Captivate, have some of this stuff built in that can suggest chapters for you. But a lot of these systems, and I've tried almost all of them, sometimes just don't suggest the right chapters. And someone like me who has a definite outline in my episodes, I even speak the outline of my episodes in my episodes because I'm, you know, let's move on to number two and that kind of thing. Many times these systems won't recognize that outline as a chapter. So you're running that risk. When some of these things are automated, it's getting it wrong. Getting some of the specifics wrong, like the spelling and such and maybe just inserting too many chapters. I see that often where they might miss the overall context of something and find the tiny, tiny little topics. Like you might just say, oh, you know what that reminds me of this time that I was walking my dog, but that's a different story. And then boom, dog walking story, chapter. You didn't even tell the story. I've seen that happen where just any kind of little tangent gets turned into a chapter. So that's the risk. But they're going to be improving those tools. So Apple, I think, does a better job of making the auto generated chapters than Spotify does. But here's the other big problem. Any chapters that they make work only only in that system. So what Apple makes works only in Apple Podcasts. What Spotify makes works only in Spotify, not in any of the hundreds of other podcast apps out there.
- [19:33]
Steve Stewart
But we are able to go into Apple podcast connect or creator.Spotify.com and grab those and then add them to the show notes, description or other places. To be able to then go out to all the apps, that's a bonus there.
- [19:46]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah, you would have to convert them and that's something that my tool can do, but you would have to download it from whichever one you like, change the format, adjust whatever it is in the chapters, and basically reapply the chapters to your episode. And if you are the one providing the chapters, then Spotify, Apple Podcasts, many of the other systems out there will usually automatically detect your chapters and therefore prioritize the chapters that you provide. You don't have to go in for every single episode and say no, use my chapters. No use my chapters. It will usually detect if you are the one providing the chapters already in the correct formats, then they will use your chapters. They might still auto generate their own chapters, like I see that in my own podcast Connect account for my own podcast that I see it is always generating chapters for my episodes. But because I provide my own chapters, it's using my chapters instead.
- [20:43]
Steve Stewart
Okay, let me ask you that the technical part of that then, because we have media hosts like Captivate and does Buzz. Yeah, buzzsprout allows you to set the time and the chapter name inside of your upload to the media host. Yeah, those get then put into the MP3 and the RSSV reads it. So when you're saying we're putting our own, does it have to be done that way for Apple to see that we have chapters or will it look at the description where it's just the episode description, show notes and recognize the timestamps that we put in there and use those. I don't think it does, does it?
- [21:18]
Daniel J. Lewis
Spotify does.
- [21:20]
Steve Stewart
Oh really?
- [21:21]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yes.
- [21:21]
Steve Stewart
I'll have to check on that.
- [21:22]
Daniel J. Lewis
If you put in time codes and it's in a particular format, which I don't remember exactly offhand, and I believe with this latest Apple update they do have a way of detecting the time codes in your notes. Okay, I could be misspeaking there because to be transparent here, I'm just so focused on the actual chapter standards that I haven't really paid Attention to. Oh, we also figure it out from these other methods.
- [21:49]
Steve Stewart
Yeah. You haven't tried to see how the chapters look in all the different apps out there, like I've been trying the last couple days.
- [21:54]
Daniel J. Lewis
That's a different project I've got going. Yeah.
- [21:57]
Steve Stewart
And that's where the confusion for me lies is. We've got Apple creating chapters, got Spotify creating chapters. They're not our chapters. And then I've got my clients supplying them. This is what they want. And, you know, I've got some who have to deal with compliance. So we always have to worry about, do we put this out there, do we let something automatically do it for us? You know, those concerns are real with some of my clients. So then wouldn't it make sense to be able to. Well, we have the ability to turn off automated chapters in Apple and I think we do in Spotify as well, and just deal with our own chapters at all. Is there a benefit to let Apple and Spotify do it or, you know, leave them on or turn off?
- [22:37]
Daniel J. Lewis
The benefit to let Apple or Spotify or any of the other tools automatically do the chapters is you don't have to do them.
- [22:44]
Steve Stewart
Okay.
- [22:44]
Daniel J. Lewis
So it's a lazy benefit. And the results might sometimes be a little bit lazy. Those little complications I mentioned earlier, but that is the main benefit, and that's why they've done it, is they want the chapters for the audiences. And so they are implementing this strategy to make the chapters. And even if you haven't asked for it, they'll make it. But if you are very particular about the chapters, then use your own. And the two most important standards to Support are the MP3 chapters and the podcasting 2.0 chapters. There are also things that you can put in the notes, like the timestamps in the notes, and there's even POD Love simple chapters is another standard out there. But the two most important to stick to the MP3 chapters and the podcasting 2.0.
- [23:30]
Steve Stewart
Yeah. For people who haven't been dealing much with chapters lately, Daniel mentioned earlier his tool, and I haven't mentioned it yet, but Daniel released. Maybe it was two months ago. Podchapters. Podchapters.com, which will do all that stuff for you, it embeds the chapters into the MP3 and it embeds. Not embeds, but it supplies them to podcasting 2.0. Correct?
- [23:52]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yes. And the other formats as well.
- [23:55]
Steve Stewart
What do you mean by the other? Oh, AAC and stuff like that?
- [23:58]
Daniel J. Lewis
Well, it also provides the podlove simple Chapters format. So if you have the ability to paste custom XML into your RSS feed, which is very dangerous, but if you have that ability, I provide those. And also it gives you. If you want to be able to just copy the timestamps as an outline and put that in your notes, I provide that. And if you want the format that works great for YouTube, if you cross post your content on YouTube and then you can also get the YouTube formatted version of the chapters and YouTube timestamps.
- [24:27]
Steve Stewart
Okay, when you say formatted, is that how it displays when I'm reading it, like a human, or are you talking about the HTML code in the background?
- [24:33]
Daniel J. Lewis
It's the particular way it has to be written in the description for YouTube to recognize that as chapters.
- [24:40]
Steve Stewart
And that's my next question is the time format how they have to be written? I've read what Apple says. I've heard what Spotify says. Spotify actually is more forgiving than Apple. Apple is saying. What is it Apple saying? You use the quotation or the. Yeah, the parentheses, and you have the six digits, hours, minutes and seconds, which seems ridiculous to me when most episodes are under an hour long and it looks horrible when you're reading a description. And I've been finding that it still works if it's only the minute and seconds, not the hours, but the parentheses. Is that mandatory these days? Is it required? I think it is for some of those apps that you tap on the timestamp and it jumps to that moment in the episode.
- [25:21]
Daniel J. Lewis
Right. And some apps prefer not the normal parentheses that we think of, but the square brackets.
- [25:27]
Steve Stewart
Oh, I need to know this.
- [25:29]
Daniel J. Lewis
It is helpful to write it that way because of the readability aspect of it. And this is when these timestamps are associated with other text, like your subheadings. If you've got notes with formatting and you've got your H2 tags, so your headings, your H threes, your subheadings below those and such. If those have chapters associated with them and you want to include timestamps with those, then it makes visual sense to put that timestamp in some kind of parenthesis or brackets or whatever it is that the system requires. Because then it just reads weirdly for a human looking at it. If they see suddenly, wait, why does it say 1 o' clock right there on that chapter? But then they see, oh, this is actually something different if it's in parentheses. So it visually changes it for us humans looking at these notes. But some of these apps also read that in particular ways. Some of them Just look for anything that looks like a timestamp, with the hours, minutes and seconds, with hours usually being optional, and they'll hyperlink that. But like for YouTube, for example, they want a specific format where that is the timestamp first and the title after that. And a similar thing with if you download the file from Apple of the chapters that they create, the format that they give you is a timestamp, a hyphen, and then the title of that chapter that is also readable in an outline sort of format where you're just looking at that outline. And that does work pretty well for YouTube as well.
- [27:00]
Steve Stewart
Is there a best practice then, for making the list of chapters all in the same spot, where you've got 0, 0, colon 00 with the parentheses around it, introduction to episode. And then you got the next chapter and the next chapter, next chapter. Or can you maybe indicate the chapter in, you know, the first paragraph under a header, and you've got that spread out throughout the entire description.
- [27:27]
Daniel J. Lewis
I would recommend trying to keep things together as much as you can. So this is in addition to the actual chapter formats that let's assume you're already going to support those with the MP3s and podcasting 2.0 chapters. So in your notes, two approaches that you could take to this, and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. You could either add the timestamps for each heading, or you could add like an outline at the top of the notes with the timestamps there. There's nothing wrong with doing both, actually, especially if your written content is very long, because what that does is it's kind of like, well, it is a table of contents for the episode, so that you can then see this is what's in this episode. I can quickly jump to these different points right here from the beginning. I get a quick outline of what's in this. And you see this with many blog posts, even these days, where the blog post has a table of contents at the top of the blog post, where people can see what's. What are all of the headings in there. And there are some plugins like for WordPress, that can automatically display a table of contents. So you could put your timestamps for those chapters in both places.
- [28:36]
Steve Stewart
I'm thinking it's best then that we control the chapters. We embed them in the MP3, so that any app that does read them, accepts them and reads them. And it doesn't actually create any. Well, it could create a little more work, but not as much more work as I would think. Just by having them listed in the show notes description. As long as we're following the right format parentheses around the minutes and seconds or the hours, minutes and seconds with the header or the, I'm sorry, the chapter name. And then there is the option too, of some media hosts. They allow you to hyperlink those chapters to something specific, which I think you gave me a good idea with making a chapter for the ad break. That's pretty fun. And then chapter images. Chapter images are kind of cool. We mentioned it earlier in the show where I was listening to trance music back in 2012 and they had chapter images because they had chapter markers there and it switched to the album cover or the 12 inch cover. Are there some benefits to having chapter images?
- [29:36]
Daniel J. Lewis
Absolutely. Let's assume we're only in the realm of audio podcasts here. So a chapter image can turn that audio podcast into something visual. My first exposure to chapters was back in the early days when it was enhanced aac. I was watching the TV show Chuck and there was a podcast called Chuck Versus the Podcast. And they used the enhanced AAC to be able to display images from the scenes that they were talking about. As they're talking about the TV show now. They did it excessively. Like they had the images switching every few seconds. Yes, you can do that, but I don't recommend it. You're going to go crazy trying to insert all those images. But still, this is a really cool idea that if you're talking about a movie or a TV show and you're breaking it down scene by scene, consider having an image for that scene that you're discussing. Or especially some of these TV shows, I did a podcast about one of them once upon a time. Some of them have these deep theories and Easter eggs hidden in them. And that's a great opportunity to use that chapter to display an image of what you're talking about so that your audience doesn't have to go to your website to try and find which image you're talking about. They don't have to scroll through really long notes. They can just look down at their podcast app and see that chapter image displayed when you're talking about it. Think about a photography podcast. Maybe they're talking about their recent trip out west to some national park or something, and they can display some of their pictures as they're talking about it. Like they say, oh, there was this great picture I got of Dome of the Rock. Look at your podcast player and if you see the chapter image, you can see how beautiful it was. So they can refer to Things that are visual, that are being displayed in that moment when the audience needs it. Other applications for this could be, for educational purposes, any kind of quotation. Like think of a Christian podcast where they're talking about scripture verses and they want the audience to be able to see the scripture verse, not just hear it, but read along with them. So they could make a chapter image that has the text of the scripture verse in that chapter image. So then the listener can look down at their podcast app and they can read that passage of scripture or read the quotation along with the person who's speaking. And think about that too, as you have that context. Sticking with the sermon example, as a pastor might be talking about how this verse applies, so the whole time he's talking about this verse, that chapter image is displaying that verse so you can see it there. And every now and then you can glance back down. Like when I go to church and my pastor is preaching on a sermon, I don't just glance at my Bible one time. There are frequently times that as he's talking, I'll look down at my Bible and see, oh yeah, that is what it says there. And just kind of get that better understanding of just quickly reviewing the context visually by reading it again. Or if you're talking about products, display an image of the product or a logo of the company. Fun things like that. You could even hide Easter eggs in some of the chapter images if you wanted to. So all kinds of great potential that you can have because this is turning an audio podcast into a semi visual experience. And don't think that you have to add images to your chapters. You don't even have to add an image to every chapter. It could just be, maybe there's only one particular chapter that you think this really needs this image. It's totally okay to do that. And what happens in the podcast apps, if they recognize those images, which most of the apps that recognize chapters do, load the images, including Apple podcasts, it will switch from the podcast cover art or even the episode cover art, it switches from that to the chapter image and then whenever that chapter is over, it switches back to whatever that fallback image is. So you don't have to worry about managing the fallbacks or what it switches back to. You just display the image that you want displayed and when it's over, it falls back properly.
- [33:40]
Steve Stewart
That's good to know. Because I did chapters in preparation for this interview. I was playing around with all the different ways of doing chapters and I inserted chapter images for the podcast editor Mastermind, show episode 119 with Jeremy ends. We talked about his marketing survey and it was cool to be able to put some of the survey results up on the screen. On the screen in the app where we were talking about, you know, how many people did audio, how many people did video, how many people did both those types of things were pretty cool. I was worried about. Well, we're asking people to stop looking at the road and looking at their phone instead. Well, they're responsible enough to make that decision themselves. Right. And they can always go back later and check it out if they want to, which I guess would be good for us. And seeing that consumption rate go up because they had to skip back and listen to it again.
- [34:25]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah. And it's certainly safer to provide that image for them. And then they. If they're driving or something like that, then they try to click through to your show notes and visit the website and scroll down to find that image while they're driving, which they shouldn't be doing, but you're just displaying that image. And that's the other thing. A lot of these car systems, like Android, Autoplay, whatever they call it for the car system, CarPlay for iOS, those will display the images there in the dashboard. So when those podcast chapter images change, the image displays there on the dashboard. So it can be just a quick glance to catch that context that.
- [35:03]
Steve Stewart
That I like. That makes total sense to me and makes it seem more worth it because it does increase the. It's like increasing the production value of the audio by adding some music and sound effects. It's in the car, it's not in front of you, but you can just glance over to the side. It's going to be a little bit bigger than your phone. Right. Most of the time, the display is going to show an image a little bit bigger than your phone. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, and I don't know if you can confirm this, but I read somewhere that you can actually use GIFs, or GIFs, if you want to pronounce it that way, as a chapter image. Is that true? Do you know?
- [35:35]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah. Many of the apps will support that.
- [35:37]
Steve Stewart
I'm going to have some fun.
- [35:38]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah, that can unlock all kinds of fun. The best thing to keep in mind is as much as possible, try to keep your chapter images square, though I know a lot of the gifs are not square. Some podcast apps will display those chapters either zoomed in and cropped, or maybe they'll add extra black space or white space around it, assume it might be one or the other. So Keep that in mind for anything that you might be displaying if it's not already cropped to a square.
- [36:04]
Steve Stewart
I've been in the podcast industry for a long time. Podcasting since 2010, podcast editing professionally since 2016. And in that time I've learned a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. And I've also learned you can never learn enough. Everything keeps changing. Look at what AI and video is doing in the past couple years. The Podcast Editor Academy has a goal of helping you to migrate through all of these changes as well. Draw on my over 10 years of professional podcast editing experience and my more than 30 years of running small businesses. Wait, is that right?
- [36:35]
Daniel J. Lewis
30 years?
- [36:36]
Steve Stewart
No, wait, it's 35 years. More than 35 years of running small businesses. Get access to me and other resources in the Podcast Editor Academy. Register now for a 249 quarterly membership. Every week I send out a weekly challenge. Get some of that Windshield University Zig Ziggler always talked about with our private podcast you can take on the road with you and of course, our monthly office hours where you can get together with other professionals in this industry where the real learning takes place. Join now podcasteditoracademy.com that's podcasteditoracademy.com so if we're designing them because I make GIFs in Canva for just images with a little bit of movable something, is there a dimension and a file size restriction just like there is for show artwork? Is that the same with chapter images?
- [37:20]
Daniel J. Lewis
There's no actual requirement, but I do suggest some good practices here. If it's going into the MP3 file, try to keep it as small as possible. Yes, it will be displayed as large as podcast cover art might normally be displayed. So think about the resolution and quality of it. But especially for the MP3, it's going into the metadata, which is before the audio. Technically, in the file, it goes before the audio. So let's say you've got 15 megabytes of audio and you've loaded it up with images and now you've got five megabytes worth of images in your chapters. Those five megabytes have to be downloaded before the audio can actually be downloaded. That's not a problem if if someone is pre downloading their episodes or their podcast app is downloading them automatically for them. It can be a problem though for the quote streaming unquote, where someone just presses play on an episode that they have not downloaded yet. That means then the podcast app will have to download those five megabytes of images with the metadata before it can get to the audio. With bandwidth these days, it's not as much of a concern, but. But it is something I suggest you keep in mind. And I'm looking for ways to try and optimize this a little bit more, especially for these MP3 things. But on the JSON side, for podcasting 2.0, which is a separate file and the images are also hosted separately, they're just linked from that JSON data, which is linked from the RSS feed there, you don't have to worry about that kind of buffering or anything like that. It will load the image when. When it needs the image, so the image can be higher quality. So if you have the ability to do your chapter images differently at different compressions or different file sizes, try to keep what's embedded in the MP3 file as small as possible. Maybe only 600 by 600 pixels and the file size maybe as low as 100 kilobytes or smaller.
- [39:24]
Steve Stewart
That's not very likely with a GIF or gif.
- [39:27]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah, it gets challenging there for sure, but in your JSON there you can get much larger, both pixel dimensions and the file size.
- [39:37]
Steve Stewart
That makes the creativity just in my brain just go way up. I just love the idea of using GIFs or GIFs as chapter images. That's really cool. But again, you gotta keep the number of chapters reasonable. I have a client who runs their chapters or they run the stuff through ChatGPTP and they provide me a list and it's usually about 10, and it might be an hour long episode. And the first nine chapters are in the first 35 minutes. And there's one more after that. It's like, what?
- [40:04]
Daniel J. Lewis
And you know, one of the reasons why that happens often is with AIs or really technically, they're called LLMs, large language models. They have a certain context window that they can understand. So if you upload a transcript that's an hour long, some of them can't read the whole transcript. So they'll only get so far down, maybe halfway down the transcript, and that's the last that it can actually read. So a little trick here, bonus tip for you. If you're working with any AI system and you're not sure if it's reading as far down as what you've provided, just simply ask it something like, what is the last thing that you read from my transcript? Or what is the last bullet point that you saw? I've tried this with certain things and I can see, wow, that the last bullet point it saw was Only a quarter of the way through this complete transcript. Certain LLMs have larger context windows, so you'll see things like 200,000 tokens, 400,000 tokens, 2 million tokens for Grok. And the tokens are not necessarily words, because one word can be multiple tokens. Just assume maybe half to a third, maybe even as small as a quarter of, that is how many words it will track. But that's the trick, is if it feels like it's not seeing the full transcript, it probably isn't, and you can just ask it, what is the last thing you saw?
- [41:29]
Steve Stewart
So if I were to summarize all this, I think I talked a lot about it earlier, but we really need to talk about it now. When we're talking with our clients or we're deciding how to do the chapters for our clients, there's option number one, which is just Apple and Spotify do it for you. And then there's option 1B, which is let Apple and Spotify do it for you. And then take one of those two and then put it into your MP3 or your media host or wherever you want to get it up there. Use those so that other apps can benefit from the chapters that they've created. But I think the best one, because we talked a lot about, I prefer talk about what goes in the description, what do we put in there for people to read, and is it clickable through the show notes and all that stuff, but throwing it into a tool that adds it to the MP3 and then some of the apps will read those, it just makes the process flow better. And am I correct in understanding that if a media host like Buzzsprout adjusts timestamps for inserted content, it's going to adjust those timestamps as well that are in the MP3?
- [42:28]
Daniel J. Lewis
Buzzsprout does. If you have a media host that supports chapters and they support dynamic content insertion. Some people call it dynamic ad insertion, but I like to just consider any content. Ask them to make sure you say, you know, if I'm uploading a 30 second and then I later have a 90 second, will the chapters appropriately shift and the transcript too? If they support the transcripts, does that appropriately shift based on the content that's inserted? Unfortunately, there are some technical complications to do it in all the standards, but for some of them, they can support it. And I think Buzzsprout and Captivate do support that.
- [43:05]
Steve Stewart
Yeah, and it would be best if it started from the media host and then went outward from there, because then all the apps get the Same information. It's not like one has it this way and one is the other way. And finally, putting the bow on the whole thing is Pod Chapters does it all for us. You can create the chapters and the headers from there. It can timestamp those chapters, it can embed it in the MP3. You can use your own transcript. I've been playing with it and I'm still learning new things about it. So you summarize exactly what it does better because obviously you built the tool and it has all the things in there that used to take me five different apps to do.
- [43:40]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah. So talk about podchapters.com that's what it was for me. I was using five different apps and spending about 30 minutes per episode adding my chapters and transcript across these five different apps in this workflow that I had to do in order to get all this stuff in.
- [43:58]
Steve Stewart
Let me pause you right there. 30 minutes just for the timestamp and chapters. That's a lot of work.
- [44:02]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah.
- [44:02]
Steve Stewart
For I don't know how much payback there is. So go on, go on.
- [44:06]
Daniel J. Lewis
And along the way, some of those 30 minutes would be very frustrating. 30 minutes with some of these tools, which would work kind of clunky and do some really frustrating things. So I started building something because I just thought, could I make something that would make this easier for me? So I. I'll admit this was a little selfish. I built it purely for myself at first. But then I very quickly realized, wait a minute, if I need this and I want this, other podcasters probably do too. So I then very quickly started building it into something that other people could use. So Pod Chapters will transcribe and chapter your podcast so that you can add that engagement, the calls to action, all of that stuff to boost your interactivity with your episodes and. And it does it in seconds. Like, my 30 minute workflow across five different apps now takes 30 to 60 seconds. Usually only 30 seconds for me, and that is even doing the transcription for me and adding the chapters, and that's even including going back and tweaking a couple things here and there sometimes. But it's super quick, super easy. And now that I have the system doing it for me, it also unlocks other things I really appreciate too. So Pod Chapters and the way it works is you bring your MP3 file and you drop it in. In the future, I'll also support YouTube links or videos if you want to work with those, but right now it's just MP3 based. You drop in your MP3 it uploads it to POD Chapters and then it processes it. And you have the option of either bringing your own transcript to save some money, because the system uses AI credits as a currency inside of it, and certain things cost a certain number of AI credits, and most expensive is transcribing the audio. But if you are already an owner of something like MacWhisperer or some other product like that, that you can do transcripts cheaply or free as long as they are VTT or SRT format, you can bring your own transcript BYOT into podchapters. So then you upload your transcript to podchapters, or you use podchapters to generate it for you. Even in the way that POD Chapters generates the transcripts for you, though, I think is better than some of these systems out there because of a couple things. Steve, have you ever seen a transcript misspell something?
- [46:25]
Steve Stewart
Always.
- [46:25]
Daniel J. Lewis
Has it ever misspelled the same thing? Almost every time?
- [46:29]
Steve Stewart
Yes.
- [46:30]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yes. So inside of POD Chapters with transcriptability, there is a find and replace feature that anytime it sees this, like this, is what I often run into with even the transcription system inside of POD Chapters when I say the audacitytopodcast.com, which is my website for my own podcast, sometimes the to in there, which is to. Sometimes it gets transcribed as the number two. Sometimes the word the is included in the domain, sometimes it's not included and it's a space, the space. Audacitytopodcast.com after seeing and recognizing some of these, I just entered them into the Find and Replace. So anytime that happens, it automatically replaces it with the correct URL. The other thing you can do is enter terms, key terms, or think of them as proper nouns, like podgagement, POD Chapters, the Audacity to Podcast Daniel J. Lewis Steve Stewart Podcast Editors Mastermind. You're setting not only the spelling, but also the style, the capitalization of it, any particular punctuation with that. So this goes into the PodChapter's transcription engine, so that when it transcribes your audio, it puts more weight on this information you've given it to produce a much more accurate transcript for you. And you can save those things. I'll talk more about saving the things in a moment. So when you get that transcript, then you can generate your chapters. And there is a basic plan for POD chapters where it's all manual. You're creating your chapters manually. There is no limit, by the way, to the number of episodes you can use or number of separate podcasts you can Use inside POD chapters. The only limit is if you use the smart features, which are AI, how many AI credits you use, and then you can choose to manage your own budget that way. So when you are then using the AI to help you with the chapters, there are two approaches to this. One is the AI can suggest the chapters for you. I have fine tuned this to obsessive degrees and I'm so happy to hear other people say, oh, I tried all these other systems, but your system gives me so much better chapters. And that's why I was going for it, because I've tried the other systems too, where you get 50 chapters or something that's just giving you a chapter for every sentence almost. Sometimes it feels like I really fine tuned it. So it recognizes your spoken outline. If you speak your outline, it recognizes overall topic changes, not the micro topic changes that happen in our sentences. And it does a really good job of suggesting the chapters for you. Then you can get those chapters suggested to you. So you're doing very little work. You can then go back and tweak those chapters if you want, change them around, shift them around slightly if you want to delete a chapter you don't like the other thing. And this is what I've wanted for years. I've asked for this feature from multiple other systems and no one's implemented it. So I just thought I'll just go build it myself then. And that is because I know my outline before I record my episodes. I am speaking from my outline. I know it, I know this is what I want my chapters to be. I want them this specific wording in this specific order. I just don't know where they need to be in my recording. I don't want to have to go looking for them like I used to have to do in spending 30 minutes to do stuff like that. So the other option is, instead of getting chapters suggested for you, is you provide your outline. And POD chapters will find where that outline needs to be placed inside the episode. I call it Outline to Chapters. So it turns your outline into chapters for you inside of it. Then if you need to, you can shift things around a little bit if you want to. You can add those links, those images if you want. And I've got in the plans for some abilities to be able to create some of those images automatically for you so that you could very easily put that quotation on an image and have that added to the chapter or even maybe some AI generated images if you wanted to get into that.
- [50:33]
Steve Stewart
Yeah, I can testify to using the Outline one of the tests that I did, and I should say Daniel invited me to take a Test drive of pychapters.com a little while ago, and it was still being built, and I wasn't quite sure if I needed it. But I came back and I'm trying it again. And I did it today with one of the episodes or one of the shows I've got. You talk about the misspellings. Retired ish is the name of the show. It's retired Ish. And all the other transcription tools are retired Ish, like Congressional Dish almost, or it's all one word. Anyway, I followed my original process and gave my client the chapters that it suggested, and he always tweaks them to what he wants. He gave them back to me. I thought, okay, I've got the timestamps. I've got the chapters. Let me throw the chapters in there without the timestamps into podchapters.com and find out what it does. All but one had the exact same timestamp. So it did. It found exactly where we wanted it. And the other one that was off was pretty much because he was kind of prefacing the thing. And then it started, and that's where the chapter in POD Chapters came up. So I can testify that it does know how to find these things based on that transcript that's in there. And it is. It's that all in one tool. So I'm gonna go ahead and give it another shot and give it another real hard drive with a couple more shows and see how it works. I still have to go into the apps and see how that displays the chapters from the MP3 that embeds in. You can tell I'm kind of excited about all this, even though I'm not exactly a fan of chapters, except some of the benefits that it does bring. I do love the images. I do love having that list to go back to if I had to. I do like that extra production value. Kind of gives the show. But with Apple and Spotify kind of putting it in there, it kind of cheapens that feeling. You know what I mean? But you can save yourself a lot of time. Just as I've learned and solidified my belief today, podchafters.com is the easiest way to go. It just does it all well.
- [52:28]
Daniel J. Lewis
And let me tell you something that's really nice for especially the editors listening right now is in Pod chapters. So this information, and it can do the ID3 tags too, by the way. So all of that information that needs to be in the ID3 for the backwards compatibility. Because some podcast apps still read from ID three chapters, especially like the image, the episode image, and some automation systems still use the ID3 data for some of that. Pod Chapters also writes to the ID3 tags for you. So you've got multiple things here that might be something that you have to enter every time for every episode. Like your ID3 tags. You follow the same basic template for your ID3 tags, except for maybe a different image, maybe a different episode title, different episode number, maybe some different notes embedded in the MP3. Your transcriptions. Also, if you're doing the same podcast, you're typically wanting to enter those same proper nouns, the same find and replace operations. There are other tools out there where that kind of stuff, you have to enter it every time or you have to save an old MP3. This is something I used to have to do where I'd save like a template mp3 and I'd copy the tags from it and paste it into the new MP3. Then I'd have to go and overwrite things. Well, in POD Chapters, there are two things that will save you a lot of time besides everything else that's built into it. Snippets. A snippet is think of you also have them as short codes. Inside of WordPress, you might see this. It's under the settings menu inside POD Chapters. The snippets are like text expansion sort of things where surrounded by double square brackets, you have double square brackets. Year that will always insert the current year, which is great for your copyright date, so you don't have to worry about going in there and changing the copyright date whenever the new year changes. It just saves whatever the current year is. And now that's what writes to the file. So it doesn't mean the file will magically change years later, but it's so you don't have to think about typing in the current year. You can create your own snippets too. For any kind of text you regularly repeat anywhere, even in your chapters. Like if there's a particular chapter, maybe it's your last chapter and you like your last chapter to always have a particular title to it. You can save that as a snippet and then simply insert that snippet as the title and it will magically be replaced as whatever that text is that you've entered. So it expands the snippet out. But the more magical thing and the podcast editors will love this presets. So what you save as an ID3 tag all the transcription options, like all Those proper nouns and find and replace options, you can save those as a preset. So then you apply that preset to Episodes later. But wait, there's more. Not only can you select those presets when you upload an episode, you could even. And there's no limit to the number of presets you have. So if you are editing for multiple podcasts, not just to episodes, but separate, completely separate clients with completely separate shows, you can have a preset for each one of them. You can also set for each preset to automatically apply based on file name patterns. For example, for the Audacity to podcast, my file names always follow the same file name pattern, that is tap a three digit number MP3. So my auto apply pattern is whenever the file name starts with tap automatically apply the Audacity to podcast preset. So all that transcription stuff there, it's already pre filled in for me. I just go in and I add in the extra proper nouns that I know were referenced in this episode. But everything else is already there for me. The ID3 tags, everything else is pre filled for me. I just enter what's unique to this episode and worry about the chapters and transcript and it's then applying quickly for me. So if you're working with multiple shows that follow file name patterns, which probably you do, then you just set that it can be, starts with, ends with, or contains. So then whenever you upload that instantly, that preset is applied. So you don't even have to go and apply the preset manually, it just auto applies for you and it's right there for when you transcribe and then do the ID3 tags and other information.
- [56:49]
Steve Stewart
So this is a supercharged ID3 editor program.
- [56:51]
Daniel J. Lewis
It can be.
- [56:52]
Steve Stewart
Yeah, it's so much. That's what I've been using to put the ID3 tags. And you know, it's funny, for a while there I realized ID3 tags, they were pretty much useless. The RSS feed pretty much took care of that. But now I see it's even more important than it had been the past five, six, seven years. That's incredible.
- [57:10]
Daniel J. Lewis
Yeah, and if you just wanted to use pod chapters for ID3 tags, you could. There is the basic plan has none of the AI features in it, and the basic plan is therefore much cheaper. And you could use that for just manual chapters and the ID3 tags, you still get the snippets, you still get the presets.
- [57:26]
Steve Stewart
So here's what you do. You go to podchapters.com, you sign up for an account and you talk to Daniel on the, on the chat if you have any other questions. But you really laid out even more stuff than I had had a chance to play with inside of your app. It's really. I see the apply preset, but I didn't realize where all that stuff was. I got to go back and think about this. This is really interesting.
- [57:44]
Daniel J. Lewis
And if you're one of those types where you get the chapters after you published and you download them from Apple Podcasts, well, there is an import feature inside Podchapters so you can import podcasting 2.0 format chapters or that file that you get from Podcast Connect, you can import that directly into podchapters and it will then convert it for you and save it to the MP3. Just make sure. I've talked to some of the customers who made this slight mistake. Just make sure you download the mp3 back from Podchapters and, and that is the mp3 that you upload to the publishing system. That's the one that has all the metadata saved to it, right?
- [58:20]
Steve Stewart
That's the baked bread. That's the one you want. And then if you are uploading it to a media host like Libsyn, do not let them overwrite the id3 tags to the mp3. Just upload it. You can read it or not, doesn't matter. But wow. Okay. Podchapters.com by Daniel J. Lewis it's simplifying the future for us. I know there's a lot of stuff coming at us fast and furious with all the different AI tools and with all this chit chat about chapters now I can see where this is the valuable tool that's going to save me time, which makes me more profitable. Wow. We have been talking for more than an hour. Is there anything that I've left out or forgotten that's really important for people, especially the people who are doing the post production. We're uploading the files, we're setting the chapter markers, we're doing the images or whatever, anything else that we're missing.
- [59:08]
Daniel J. Lewis
The big thing is really communicating the value of this to your customer, the podcaster, and why it's valuable to the audience. Because like that objection is the biggest objection. And as Steve and I already talked about the idea about the ads, you can show how these objections can be solved by using some of these things and worked around and actually that the objections aren't all that bad after all, really focus though on what is the value to the audience, not just the value to you or the podcaster but how will the audience benefit from this? And you as the editor, you could look at this as an upsell service.
- [59:52]
Steve Stewart
Yep, absolutely. And we can also dilute that objection by saying, well, look, Apple and Spotify is doing it already, so we need to get control of this thing.
- [59:59]
Daniel J. Lewis
Would you rather let them do it in only their proprietary platform or would you like full control of it to support all of these other platforms?
- [60:08]
Steve Stewart
Yep. Well, Daniel, I appreciate you being here. Thanks so much. I'm going to put podchapters.com in the show notes. Although it's pretty easy to remember, we've been talking about chapters the whole time, so pod. We know what POD stands for. Chapters dot com. Daniel, thanks for being on the show.
- [60:22]
Daniel J. Lewis
Thank you so much, Steve.
- [60:27]
Steve Stewart
Podcast editing news, podcast editing events and podcast editing tips. You can get all this information free by subscribing to the Podcast Editor Industry Newsletter. Sign up at podcasteditoracademy. Com Newsletter. That's podcasteditoracademy. Com newsletter.