[ziggity]

Overcast is an interesting case study on optimizing for listeners vs. creators.

The app developer, Marco Arment, is also co-host of Accidental Tech Podcast. One cool feature in Overcast is chapter markers: You can embed ID3v2 chapter frames in your RSS feed's MP3 files indicating when different segments start. This lets the listener jump between segments, it's a pretty slick experience.

Unsurprisingly, ATP uses this functionality. Advertising chapters are labelled as such, but the timecodes are always deliberately skewed so that skipping to the next chapter after an ad still gives you the last 15 seconds or so of the ad read.

I suppose this is a slightly better user experience than disabling the Skip Next button altogether on an ad segment, but it still irks me to be on the losing end of a conflict of interest.

...says the guy (me) complaining about a free podcast being played in a free podcast app.

[mikestew]

Even as I typed my follow-up, I was thinking, "ya know, I wouldn't put it past Arment to just replicate the Now Playing UI and then season to taste." So, yeah, bad example.

a free podcast app

Arment's attention to little details is one of the reasons I <cough> paid whatever trivial amount he wants for an app I use daily. ;-)

[eropple]

Does anything besides Overcast actually respond to chapter markers?

...says the guy (me) writing a self-hostable podcast platform.

[ziggity]

Apparently I was wrong about how podcast chapters are embedded: It's not in the RSS feed itself but encoded as ID3v2 tags in the MP3 file.

Apple Podcasts added support in iOS 12, here's a Google Sheet of the rest: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c2L14UVH1xtN4iDG4awh...