Can I ask – What program are you guys using to make those clickable topics/chapters for your podcasts? Does Audacity do that? Googling the question brings up lots of old articles asking for the feature but I can’t see that it was added. Maybe I am looking for the wrong keyword?
In this day and age the joy of Google is knowing the exact technical term to use in a search. I am assuming that your referring to the Chapter “Timestamps” on YouTube videos. This was asked recently on the forum and it was reported that it is done by hand. You can see the thread here:
Additionally, here is a fairly recent article explaining the process:
which was found in duckduckgo with:
embed timestamp chapter video
If you are looking for something else or have additional questions, just ask.
Thank you very much! But in distinction to YouTube, I was looking for how to do this with mp3 podcasts, which is how I listen to DL. I found articles about use of “Hindenburg” but that is not a Linux program and I presume that our Linux podcasts are done with audacity or something similar (?).
I know in my Android podcast player (Antennpod) the links in the show notes are clickable, so there must be something embeddable into the mp3 - but maybe it is the podcast app itself that makes them clickable(?)
Michael creates the timestamps manually and in order to include them for podcast apps they have to be embedded into the MP3 which there’s multiple ways to do that.
That is pretty much what I am wondering, whether there is a special markdown like format that must be followed, or whether the various podcasting apps just see something in an hour minute format and automatically translate that into a link.
For audio files you’re looking at binary data that is prepended to the mp3 file in a format that conforms to ID3 tag specification. It’s a bit of a wild west thing in recent revisions of the specification. In the old days of ID3 v1, the tag info was the last 128 bytes of the file. It was easy enough to strip off the last 128 bytes with php to read and manipulate the data. Other programming languages would work also but php happen to be what I used for a web based application that utilized mp3 tags.
The current version of the standard is ID3v2.4 can either be written in the beginning or the end of the file. Added to that difficulty is that the size restrictions are removed which means you can’t just lop off 128 bytes and get what you need.
You can use a hex editor to gain access to this data if it is written into a file. If you are a programmer, there are libraries for php, perl, python, java, go, etc… that will allow you to roll your own. But when you need a pencil, most folks don’t want to start with chopping down a tree (i.e. there are easier ways).
There are a few implementations of ID3v2.4 tag processors for Linux. But one that is well written is in the KDE line and known as KID 3. With Kid3 you can see and manipulate chapter settings.
Kid3 also comes with a cli version. It was in my regular Ubuntu repository and easily installed with
sudo apt-get install kid3-cli
Additionally, you can see what is available to you in your software repositories with the following command (at least this is what I use for my Ubuntu flavor):
sudo apt-cache search id3
Maybe this will get you going in the right direction.
If you are talking about the chapters and links embedded into the actual mp3 file, that’s part of the id3 standard, and up to the app to implement. If you’re talking about what you read in the show notes, when you open the podcast, then that’s not a standard and up to the app itself to implement.
I’ve used ffmpeg to embed chapters before. (With mixed results on mp3 files.)
I think OP wanted to know what Michael actually does.