In this episode, we'll discuss India's newest podcast app PodLP, dive into Pandora's quirky stats package, chat about the importance of podcast transcripts, and explain how you can add chapter markers to your episodes in Buzzsprout.
Submit your podcast to PodLP
Learn more about Magic Mastering and what it can do for your podcast's audio quality.
Articles referenced in this episode:
Subscribe to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel to watch gear reviews, software tutorials, and podcast strategy videos.
Join the Buzzsprout Podcast Community on Facebook, so you don't miss out on the "Free Year of Descript" contest we plan on running soon.
Review Buzzcast in Podchaser to let us know what you think of the show.
Contact Buzzcast
Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!
In this episode, we'll discuss India's newest podcast app PodLP, dive into Pandora's quirky stats package, chat about the importance of podcast transcripts, and explain how you can add chapter markers to your episodes in Buzzsprout.
Submit your podcast to PodLP
Learn more about Magic Mastering and what it can do for your podcast's audio quality.
Articles referenced in this episode:
Subscribe to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel to watch gear reviews, software tutorials, and podcast strategy videos.
Join the Buzzsprout Podcast Community on Facebook, so you don't miss out on the "Free Year of Descript" contest we plan on running soon.
Review Buzzcast in Podchaser to let us know what you think of the show.
Contact Buzzcast
Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!
I feel like I'm getting a very strange view of Travis's home life right now like watching endless hours of HGTV with the subtitles on, like, how many times do you have to read? I love the open concept and oh, if you put shiplap up in this house many times you need to read it before you're like, Oh, I know.
Travis :Welcome back to Buzzcast. Guys, another couple weeks in the books. It's good to see you guys. Alvin, Kevin. Good to see you.
Kevin :Alban are you there?
Alban :It's great to see you. I know. That was a weird start. I was like, nobody really was here. Every would be like, good to see you too.
Kevin :Thanks for having me.
Alban :Thanks for having me on the podcast.
Travis :Well, I just you know, it's it's the tradition whenever you interview somebody, like you talk for like 1520 minutes at the beginning, and you're like, Okay, we're gonna start and then you pretend like you've like not seeing them. It's like House Hunters, where they like meet and they're both miked up, but they're pretending like they're meeting for the first Time with this like random restaurant
Kevin :of like HGTV and yeah,
Alban :a lot of it's exactly like House Hunters
Travis :got it gotta pass time in quarantine somehow, you know,
Alban :we're gonna add a new segment like HGTV shows from Travis like you could give us recommendations. And everyone listening to this podcast, go and listen to that. Oh no. What are they? What are they called trusts? What other shows are there?
Travis :Well, you got House Hunters, which is probably the one that you've seen waiting in the dentist's office. It's your
Kevin :most favorite one.
Travis :No, no, not at all. I know
Kevin :about House Hunters is the Saturday Night Live spoof that they did on that Did you see it? No. It might not have been House Hunters or something like that where they're like you know this couple he's a dog walker and she you know craps macaroni necklaces on the weekend. Their budget is $800,000
Alban :they're always these insane but it's the you're like, how how is this Muslim
Kevin :have like real jobs and they all have millions of dollars to spend on houses.
Travis :So, so House Hunters is not real. I don't know if, if, if I totally just broke someone's heart listening to this episode. So in order to get on House Hunters, you have to already be under contract for a house. And then they choose two other random houses in the area. And they make pretend that you're choosing between the three of them. That's how science works.
Alban :I read an article that actually said like, often it's like, some of them aren't even on the market. And so you'll see some that they have furniture in them. And they're like, yeah, there's furniture in it. It's because it's probably a friend's house and it's just like their friend. They're walking through their friend's house like I don't like this. It looks like it's like, hey, Jim, I let you my house. never lie to you my house again. Phil.
Travis :What Why did they do that? Do you understand? Like, it can't be that hard to find three houses that somebody could legitimately look at and make a real I don't understand the business model. All I know as people like imagining that they can be a macaroni craft artist and have an $800,000 budget. I think it's just the Yeah, that's that's the appeal. That's the appeal. But if you want to watch a good HGTV show, watch flipper flop or fixer upper. Those are both
Alban :oh my gosh, this podcast is going down very quickly with everyone's like, okay, I want to learn about the podcast industry. We're like, HGTV reviews, dress. Do you have any podcasting things to talk about this episode,
Travis :you have a couple bits, couple low hanging fruit things we want to talk about and cover. The first one is a brand new podcast app you've never heard of called pod LP. This is going to be the first podcast app podcast listening app for India's Chi o 's mobile operating system. I'm pretty
Kevin :sure like I only understood every other word of whatever you just said. Chi o s pod LP. I have no no idea about any of this. Okay,
Travis :what's going on. So the TLDR There's a new podcast app that you can easily submit your podcast to. That puts you in front of more potential listeners.
Alban :I looked it up Kevin because I had no idea what Cai iOS was either. It's the number two operating system for phones in India. It's on over 100 million phones. And it's like a Linux it's based off of Linux. So and then a medium article I SAW said it was the most important operating system for phones. I didn't read the article that seemed a little clickbait. But there's gonna be get your podcast in front of new listeners. That's always a pretty easy sell, especially if like Travis is saying it's a pretty easy submission process.
Travis :Yeah, you literally go to a web page. They say put your RSS feed here, you put it there, and you hit submit, and they're like, boom, you're in and, and that's it. So
Alban :we should actually submit this podcast so that people could learn more about HGTV when they're using their iOS mobile phone.
Travis :Oh, it has been submitted my friend. We are on iOS We are in pod LP.
Alban :If you are listening to this on pod LP, shoot us an email to support@buzzsprout.com. And let us know. I would we'd love to hear about your experience.
Travis :Yes, the submission process was very easy, especially compared to Pandora who has yet to approve Buzzcast.
Alban :Wait, I thought we were it. Yeah,
Kevin :no, I got an email that said we have been approved with a link to accept their terms of service. So I clicked the link and agreed to their terms. And and then nothing and then I logged in two weeks later, and we're still pending.
Alban :Oh, bummer.
Travis :Yeah. So it's been what a two and a half month process and we're
Kevin :over three months now.
Travis :Yeah. But if you happen to be one of the lucky souls that is in Pandora, they just launched their new podcast analytics, which if you have logged into podcasts Connect for Apple podcasts, or the Google podcast manager or Spotify for podcasters dashboard. It's a very similar kind of thing. They're giving you data points for their in app listening. So you can see a heat map of like where your different listeners are congregating. They can show you agent demographic data for however many of your episodes are being played in Pandora and a new data point that I guess makes sense for Pandora but I have not seen before, which is elapsed seconds. What does that mean time? Yes. So it's so you can see like how many times someone has started an episode. You can see how many unique listeners you have over a 28 day period. They show you your lifetime thumbs up and thumbs down. So how to start a podcast which is in Pandora we have 23 thumbs up and only three thumbs down. So that's pretty good. A pretty good ratio right there. And so then, over the last 28 days, in Pandora how to start a podcast has 16,388 elapsed seconds of plane
Alban :waves and I was like holy cow. This is huge.
Travis :So so if you want to use a really big number to impress some, some potential advertisers then log into your Pandora dashboard and use your elapsed seconds data point. But other than that, it's just another podcast analytics tool.
Kevin :As I was thinking about that, the other day like that we track podcasts in, you know, downloads, or plays and different metrics depending on which dashboard you're logged into. But the main one being your hosting site, they're all pretty much, you know, Buzzsprout. Everybody else pretty much just displays downloads. But YouTube is very different YouTube displays, like their main metric is minutes watched, which it sounds like Pandora is kind of taking the same cue and going for seconds listened. Sort of minutes watched.
Travis :Yeah, if you think about all the times that somebody has it suggested they listen to five seconds and they're like, Nope, I don't want to listen to it. You get a couple hundred people doing that, like you can get some really solid statistics there.
Kevin :Yeah, I wonder why that matters. Like I have to think about in the YouTube world. It's sort of makes sense because they only will drop ads in every so many minutes, right? I think you get like one mid roll for a video that's less than 10 minutes or something. But you can have multiple mid rolls for videos that are more than 10 minutes. So I wonder if we have Pandora is thinking something similar? And that's why they're going to start to track that second listened metric up front.
Alban :I don't know. What's the point. See, one interesting data point I pulled Travis for Pandora was, you know, when you're talking about all these seconds, I'm actually thinking like how many plays this is actually equate to, in how to start a podcast, which is actually done really well. It's got over 100,000 place now. But in Pandora, it has 779. So that's only over the last few weeks. So it's a fair amount of place. I mean, it's a bit more than the lifetime what we've ever it's more than we've ever had it from I Heart Radio or podcast addict or Windows Media Player. Windows Media players actually do pretty well.
Travis :Windows Media Player. The unsung juggernaut of the podcast player space.
Alban :Yeah, it's just interesting to see, you know, it's there's actually a fair amount of place if you can get in. So go ahead and submit if you haven't. And hopefully Pandora will approve you, you know, eventually,
Travis :at least within six months or so. So Kevin was recently featured in a widely distributed podcast related news article talking about podcast transcripts, were you not?
Kevin :Yeah. James Cridland from pod news. dotnet. And I were having a conversation and I imagine he was having a similar conversation with a bunch of other people, but we're talking about transcripts, the benefit of using them sort of the pitfalls of using an Buzzsprout position on them. And he took a couple pieces of the our email exchange and quoted me in this article and the article came out really nice. I was happy to be a part of it. But basically, he was talking about he transcripts kind of big picture, the good and the bad, and we don't i don't think a whole lot about the bad, but there are some podcast pastors who are not super thrilled about third parties that are transcribing their podcasts themselves, like without permission from them. It's kind of, for me, it was a stretch to figure out like, what why are people upset about this, but then we, as we were discussing, he was saying, Well, you know, think about like audio drama. Those are creative pieces, right? They've created a story. They have voice actors, all this kind of stuff. And now you've just given somebody the ability to consume it a different way. And it was a creative piece that they might want more control over. Right? They might want to write it a certain way. They might only presented a certain way. It's kind of like if somebody had an audiobook, and then you created a text based version of that book, because they didn't create one. So you're just like, well, I'll create it for you. Well, they might not want you to do that. Again, in the podcasting world, for most of us, we're kind of fine with that because the reasons that people are doing it are for accessibility. So people who might have a hearing impairment can still consume that content or for discoverability. So If Google is going to transcribe our podcasts automatically, so that when people search Google, they might surface as us as a result, we're not going to be too upset about that. But there are some cases where people might not want that to happen. And so the article talked a little bit about that. But then it also talked about the benefits. And that's, again, where I express my opinions, more posts browse big believer in transcripts, we always have been, and for the two reasons that we mentioned, discoverability being a big one, but then also the accessibility like people overlook that a lot. They say like, Is it worth it? For me to provide a transcript of my podcast episodes? And we always say yes, always worth it to make your content as accessible to as many people as possible while doing that, like you do get this ancillary benefit of being more discoverable. But I don't necessarily know that that should be your prime motivation, like our prime motivation should be. We're creating great content and we believe it's valuable. We believe that we have a message to get out to the world. Don't we want to make that as accessible as we can to as many people as possible, regardless of their, you know, abilities or disabilities.
Alban :I definitely agree with That Personally, I've noticed I've used transcripts quite a bit to share podcasts with people. So I can think of quite a few times I listen to this show called conversations with Tyler. And I will go and find pieces of it that I'm like that was a really good part of the conversation. And actually just copy it and share that on Twitter. And I'm sharing that transcript or image of the part of the transcript and then with the episode itself. And it's just a nice way to be able to share a specific piece and kind of give people like, Hey, here's a little taste of what you would get, and why they really would like it. I think that performed pretty well. And then sometimes the audio quality just isn't the best. And so the audio quality isn't the best for a podcast. It's really nice to be able to go read through a transcript, especially if it's a guest, you really want to kind of digest what they're saying, and maybe the audio may not have been working for you for whatever reason.
Kevin :Now, one of the things that I mentioned in that article, and I think I don't want to get into it too much, because we don't really have anything to announce yet. But it's something that we think is interesting. And we're exploring. And that is, once you have a transcript, how do we push those out to our listeners? How do we make them more available to people as they are listening to our podcasts right now? There's no way to do that. So like, for example, you're listening to your favorite song in your favorite music player. Let's say it's at either Apple Music or Spotify or Pandora. In most of those apps, I don't not sure about Pandora. But I think so I think you can switch into lyrics mode, right. When you're listening to a song. podcasts, you cannot do that right now. Which seems to me like that's a pretty logical step. Right? We should be able to listen to a podcast. And like Alvin said, there might be a part that we just didn't understand what they said, or we might want to read along as we're listening. There's no podcast app that I'm aware of right now that has the ability to do that. And I believe that the reason for that is because those podcast apps don't don't have access to reliable transcripts, we've got to thinking Buzzsprout One of the things that more and more podcasters are doing on the Buzzsprout platform is they are providing reliable transcripts for their episodes. And so as they do, could we then provide those transcripts to the apps. And so we are starting to take steps to be able to do that we're looking at ways of adding transcripts into the RSS feed, so apps could access the transcripts, and then they could display them if they wanted to. And we're trying to reach out to app makers to see if anybody's interested in taking the step with us. So it's motivation again, like I don't have anything to announce yet, but I think it would be a good healthy step for the podcast industry overall. And as soon as we have more to announce, I will because I think it'd be very exciting. I would love to be able to switch into lyrics mode as I'm listening to podcasts.
Travis :Yeah, I don't watch anything on TV now without subtitles turned on. I've been completely ruined. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter if I know what they're saying. It started with like watching British talent. shows where they'll like, say, British isms. And I don't understand them because I'm American, right? So I'd have the subtitles turned on. So I could read along. And like, Oh, that's what they're saying. And so now I just have subtitles all the time. So subtitles for podcasts, which is essentially a transcript that's running in real time, like a lyric mode would be really interesting.
Alban :I feel like I'm getting a very strange view of Travis's home life. like watching endless hours of HDTV with the subtitles on like, how many times do you have to read? I love the open concept and oh, what if we put shiplap up in this house? You need to read it. You're like, Oh, I know.
Travis :Don't forget Don't forget the recessed lights. Alvin. Don't forget the recessed lights.
Alban :The recessed lighting is definitely a plus. If there's any Yeah, I think I mean, there may be people listening to this episode, who actually do create podcasts, apps and if you are someone who's working on podcast apps, I think You know, you're someone we would probably want to talk to about it, you know, it wouldn't just be Buzzsprout trying to drop it into the, you know, into the RSS feed, we'd want to work with people to make sure it was actually a value add, and that listeners were like actually getting something, you know, it'd be beneficial. One of the points that I would add, though, you know, in Kevin's time on negatives of other people transcribing your content, a couple that have sprung To my mind, one, automated transcripts are not super accurate. We moved from one service over to otter.ai. Because otter.ai is so much better at transcribing, whether they're still mistakes and sometimes those mistakes capture the exact opposite intent of what you meant to say or what you did say, you know, didn't can actually sound pretty similar to did and not getting that not is a can be a big difference. And then the other is kind of the reasons why sometimes people will use Vimeo over YouTube for video is just If you actually want people to come to your site, I'm just thinking like an SEO perspective. And so you want all that transcripts to only live one place on the entire internet, and that be your site and have it floating around on three or four different sites. Now, other people's websites are competing with you for your own content. And you really just want everyone coming to your site to consume it. And we definitely see the value of that because we can see in you know, our from our website traffic, we can see 10s of thousands of podcasts with transcripts that I can see they actually move up in the rankings once they start transcribing episodes. And so it would really be a bummer that you're going through all that hassle. And then all of a sudden, you realize Google is also doing it and go to other places are hosting your transcript.
Kevin :So we'll link to the article. There's a bunch of interesting stuff in there. Some of it you have to take with a grain of salt, like there's some quote in there about some site that added Automated transcripts to their website, and then they their web traffic went up 80%. I'm not sure about some of that. But you can read it, decide for yourself. transcripts are really good. They are there. And here's the thing, there are time investment. Travis will tell you because he does transcripts for our podcasts, they are a time investment. And so they're not something that I say everyone has to start with right away. But as you start making gains in other areas of your podcasts, like we've gotten a little bit better on the show, like it takes us you know, if we're gonna record a 30 minute show, it takes us about 35 minutes to do it. Travis is getting a little bit faster with editing is using new tools like Hindenburg and stuff in picking up gains there. So a three hour edit might be down to an hour and a half now. And so as you're making gains, you might get a little bit more bandwidth to add new things. One of those things worth considering is transcripts because they are super valuable and we are looking for more and more ways to make them powerful and accessible for the listeners of your show. Speaking of gains, one of the tools that we rolled out a couple months ago to help people gain efficiency in editing your podcast was magic mastering and we have just completed our third month since launch of that tool. And so I went and looked at how was it doing like how many people are using it? How many episodes have run through how many hours have reprocessed and I thought it'd be fun for you guys to try to guess. Yep, we're making some guesses
Travis :Sure. What are what are we guessing what are we guessing?
Alban :seconds? seconds process? seconds what a second to last
Travis :a second. So left I could do the conversion.
Kevin :I could do the conversion. Okay, so I've only really have two things that are worth guessing. Let's start with the total number of episodes that have been run through magic mastering and this is only one time so like if an episode like if you replay if you run the episode through magic mastering and then you replace it a couple days later. You replace the audio. That doesn't count. Okay? This is just like original. So how many episodes have we mastered? How many episodes have we magically mastered? I am gonna say
Travis :6000 episodes 6000
Kevin :Okay, this is one of those deals where you can't go over. You have to be under prices right style
Alban :prices. Right. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's too low Travis my. I mean, so I'm gonna I guess I'll have to like double that. So maybe I'm going 12,000 Bob.
Kevin :Who's the new host? It's not Bob anymore. Who is it?
Travis :That's true carry true carry. That's true.
Alban :I can see how long it's been since I've stayed. Oh, we have a 6000
Kevin :Yes. And the 12,000 guests. actual number 16,300.
Alban :Whoa. That is epically. All right. No. So I'm headed to the showdown showroom showdown. Now it's right,
Travis :you're either gonna get a vacation to Bermuda or you're not depending on How you doing on this next quest
Kevin :on? So this was a I mean, I think that officially puts magic mastering as like probably the most successful new feature that we rolled out in Buzzsprout. possibly e
Travis :er, like the thing that people are using the most. We rolled out things like we just talked about transcripts, we rolled out visual sound bites, we've rolled out chapter markers, tools, a bunch of tools to help you make your show as great as possible. This one probably has got the quickest adoption and the highest level of success. So we're really excited about that. Did you have a question? No, I was just gonna say it's, it's awesome. Because I know this has been a, this has been a long term project for us. So like a lot of our projects work in six weeks cycles. This has been one where we it's been like, it was like an 18 month process of figuring out what's the best solution? How do we really make it simple and straightforward. So it's great that it's paying off so w
Kevin :ll. Yep. seems to be working good. Okay, so 16,380 episodes over the past three months have been run through how many hours Does that work out too? That's my next
Travis :ne. I'm going to say I'm going to say 12,000 ho
Alban :rs. I am not going to do that. I think I'm going to do the math. I'm going
Travis :for how am I doing this math wrong? There's 60 minutes in an hour. Not
Alban :100 Oh, okay. I was doing second labs. All right, if we're doing that I'm going for 10,370 hours r
Kevin :ght rules. You just missed it. It was 10,219 you're really close. No way. What did you guess? Like 45 minu
Travis :es? All right, I went o
Alban :er. Oh, nice. I tried to do the math at 38 minutes because I was like, I think the average episodes I was just think I was actually just assigning this blog post to someone. How long should episodes be and I was so it's kind of on the mind that I was like, I think Somewhere around 37 minutes the average right? That's
Kevin :not ideal. That is it. So 10,000 hours, 16,000 episodes, average episode length around 3738 minutes. And pretty exciting. It's been a really great upd
Alban :te. That's good. So that's, you know, a lot of seconds elapsed for Pandora, a lot of seconds elapsed that people have listened to, you know, a little bit higher quality audio. Hopefully we've saved. I mean, I know anecdotally, in the Facebook group, I see a ton of people say things like, you know, I used to master my episode, and then I would upload it from Hindenburg. And then it would go into Buzzsprout and do this thing. And they're like, now I edit it and Hindenburg and I just published the Buzzsprout. And I already have magic mastering turned on. And so the rest is done for me. And so it's very cool to see people get exact, I mean, you always think like how the workflows will get better. But then hearing just a handful of people say this is how my workflow got much better. It feels great to see you know, to see how that works and how it's just you've actually improved someone's l
Kevin :fe. I will tell you this, we had a support case come in last week. And the magic mastering was making their episodes sound worse. And I was like what can't do that we've worked really hard to make sure it couldn't do that. And so I listened in here's the problem they were must have been using like a Blue Yeti or some sort of condenser mic and like, I don't know what's a very loud echoey room like a roller rink or something. It was a ton of reverb. And magic mastering does not do a good job of taking out reverb. And it it amplified the episode like the volume, the overall loudness of it. And so then it just sounded worse. So, just a heads up if you're using a Yeti in a roller rink. Match mastering is not going to solve it for you. But there's only I think I talked about a case earlier. There's only been two cases now since we've launched, where magic mastering actually made an episode sound not Yeah may sound worse. I don't like saying that. Maybe didn't make it sound better like it's supposed to so
Travis :two out of what 16,000 somet
Kevin :ing two out of 16,000 that's pretty good odds. You
Travis :now what's what's what are the odds of being struck by lightning? Is it greater or less than that? I am really cur
Alban :ous there's this is this episode is man going off the rails at times we're talking a lot about TV daytime TV shows and lightning strikes so we're looking up all sorts of weird s
Travis :ats All right, it is it is a little more likely that your your episode is not helped by magic mastering then being struck by lightning because those odds are one in 700,000, which we can all rest safely at night now knowing
Alban :hat Oh, man, I mean, one actual piece of podcasting content that I'll drop here it's it's weird. I don't know what this podcast is about. Now. One of the things I talked to a guy as a sound engineer for Turner, and one of the things piece of advice he gave me that was really as always stuck with me is like to make your editing your mastering your production all that easier, the best thing to do is just to get a clean recording to begin with. And I think about Kevin's example, you know, if you've got a condenser mic that's picking up a lot of stuff, and then you're not in the best environment, you get a lot of reverb, it's gonna be difficult to try to solve that, you know, the algorithms are gonna have struggle with it, but we recently through a recording that we'd done, because the audio wasn't perfect. And that's just, you know, once an audio recording is not it misses some threshold, it becomes very difficult to get it to where it needs to be. And so, you know, anything you can do on the front end to learn a little bit more about mic technique, which we've got some articles on, or just sound treating your room. Those really help an immense amount and they will make every other piece quite a bit easier. Well s
Kevin :id. Yeah. That's good advice my neighbors have we as you say that my neighbors have construction going on next door. And so I've been sitting here they've been cutting off everyday around three o'clock which is why we started recording today at three o'clock but I've been hoping that they don't pop in. For that exact reason it's hard to get stuff out and and one of the thing of the tools that you can use especially for doing remote recordings like this is that we all are recording our own local channels. So while Alvin's talking if they start jackhammering next door, Travis could pull that out of my track, and it wouldn't bleed into Alvin's. So there are some tools that you can do to improve your odds. But exactly like he said, if you if you want to have a good recording at the end of the day, the best thing you can do is get some the right equipment and the right room to record in the first place. And typically what we recommend is a dynamic microphone and then some sort of sound treatment for whatever room that you're in and it doesn't have to be expensive stuff. It can be old comforters and blankets. It can be you know soft pillows thrown around the room. Just Something to knock down some of the echo that reverb that that happens is we're talking in a small space. We mentioned all the time like recording in a walk in closet is a great idea. If you've watched any of our Podcasting Q&A episodes, one of our hosts Gilan, she didn't have a great recording setup at our house. Or so she thought until Travis said, Hey, do you have a closet that you can fit in? And she did. And she went and recorded in there. And it was great. The sound was awesome. And so we use that and she's on our YouTube channel and there's nothing you know, we've seen pictures of era glass recording in a closet, there's nothing to be ashamed of. We got to do what you got to do to get a good recording because fixing it afterward is usually very difficult, if not impossi
Alban :le. I love seeing all the comments on John's videos because everyone is reading the his writing. Like I love your location. That's so cool. I record the closet as well. And it's so affirming I think for people to see, you know, your setup that you may have felt like it's kind of I hope no one like I hope I'm not embarrassed by my setup, and then you see other people doing it. You're like, Oh, yeah, the setup isn't what matters at all. And no one is thinking it's weird that I record episodes in a closet, because that makes perfect se
Travis :se. So magic mastering awesome, makes your audio even awesomer if you record in a closet first. So the last thing we want to talk about today is really a new segment that we haven't done on Buzzcast. Before, which is doing a feature highlights. So we do talk about new features as they're coming out. We just talked about magic mastering for a considerable period of time. But as Kevin mentioned, there's a lot of features and a lot of functionality built into Buzzsprout. That unless you know it's there, and unless you know, like to look for it and how to use it, you might not know how it could benefit your show. So in this episode, we wanted to talk about chapter markers. Now, how long have we had chapter markers built into Buzzsprout? Do you either you guys reme
Kevin :ber maybe two years. Maybe a little more sound right al
Alban :um. That sounds about right. I mean, it's definitely on the order of years. I don't know they're the last like five years of Buzzsprout have kind of been a blur at times where I'm like, I think I remember I looked at a blog post, I was thinking about rewriting, and it was from 2014. And I was like, holy cow, a lot has changed in six years. So sometimes my, my timing is a little bit
Travis :ff. Yeah. So so it's been around for it's not a new new feature. And just in a nutshell, what chapter markers do is they allow you to essentially create markers and time within your episode. So if you have ever gone and listen to a podcast episode, and you're like, Okay, I don't want to listen to the banter part of the beginning, I just want to skip right to the interview section. Or, you know, they mentioned something and I want to go back and re listen to that particular part of the podcast episode. And you found yourself like just scrolling back and forth on the timeline, trying to find trying to get lucky and try and find that screen. Where you want to listen to chapter markers essentially fix that problem and make it a lot easier to navigate around your podcast episode. So we use them for all of our Buzzsprout podcasts, even the short ones, even Podcasting Q&A episodes, we use chapter markers, because it just again makes it easy to kind of skip to a specific place in the episode. And that way, if you only want to listen to one part of it, or if you want to go back and re listen to something, it's very easy to navig
Kevin :te. Yeah. And we're preaching a little bit to the choir here. Because if you listen to this podcast, then you know what chapter markers are most likely, because this podcast has them. And so the question that I think we would pose to you is, do you find them useful? Do you go back and say, oh, on Buzzcast, a couple episodes ago, they talked about this, and I want to find that. The idea is that chapter markers would make that easier to find. And that's how we use them. Now, if you're listening this podcast and you're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I can't find these chapter markers, then you might be using one of the few apps that doesn't support chapter markers. And Travis, do you do you know offhand, like the list of apps that Do support verse, the popular ones that d
Travis :n't the one that does the best job, I think of integrating it into their listening experiences overcast, because it's just the you just swipe twice on the screen, and you can get to the chapter marker menu, Apple podcasts supports chapter markers. You just have to scroll down when you're listening. And you'll go past the show notes. And there's a chapter marker section. I don't believe that Spotify supports them. Surprise, surprise, can't listen to us on Spotify. But I'm pretty sure that most of the major podcast apps that pull their shows from Apple podcasts now support chapter mark
Kevin :rs. And I know there's a couple of third party apps. I can't think of the one off the top my head but I was testing one the other day. Was it pocket cast, maybe pocket casts or Castro, I think it was Castro supports chapter markers, but it's like a premium upgrade. So the free version of the app that you get doesn't have it. So they made me pay him like 299 or something and now I have it. Anyway, all that to say if you don't have them in the app that you're looking at or listening on, right Now, check and see if they have a premium version. And then you can support them and get chapter markers. And if not, you might want to try a different podcast app to see if you like it better. And get access chapter markers and see how you like them. So if you don't use them for your show, we would encourage you to give it a shot. And if you're interested in giving chapter markers a shot for your show and you host on Buzzsp
Travis :out What should they do Travis, when you are in your episode screen, where you have your right sidebar, where you do where you schedule your release, where you have the links to Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and you can email links to the episode and that kind of stuff on that right sidebar, up near the top under the scheduling module. You can either do chapter markers, or you can do transcript those are the two what's it called promote your episode or booster episode. I don't want to say something wrong. Nothing It doesn't say anything. It's right. It's right above promote this episode is view edit chapters. It doesn't say anyth
Kevin :ng. used to say used to say amplify this episode doesn't say that. Y
Alban :ah, I was about to say that. And then I'm looking at it, it's just as promote a brand out of brand mentioned. And then below that transcripts, and below that chapter mark
Travis :rs. Yeah, so so it's over there, it's towards the top. And if you click on that, it'll take you to a screen where it has the single episode embed player, so you can play the episode. And then there's fields underneath that where you can add individual chapter markers. So you're going to add the timestamp, the hours, minutes, seconds timestamp of where you want that chapter marker to start. Then the next box that you can fill out is the title of the chapter marker. So if it's a new segment, or an ad read or an interview, so and so like that's where you put them. And then to the right of that, you can also use the URL. So let's say that you mentioned a software that you promote, and you have an affiliate code, you could put that affiliate code that affiliate link embedded as a URL in the chapter marker. So just to make it just that much easier. for someone to take action on it, or if you're promoting, you know, a different episode that you've done recently that you want people to go back and listen to, you can put that URL as a chapter marker. So those are the three main fields that you have to fill out. And then you just hit Save chapter, and then it'll automatically drop a new one down. And you just keep doing that process until you finish all your chapter mark
Kevin :rs. So that's it if you if you enjoy chapter markers, when you listen to this podcast or others, then you have access to a tool in your Buzzsprout account that you can do those yourself in your own podcast. I always appreciate that as a listener, if I sign up or subscribe to a new podcast, one of the first things I look for is chapter markers. And it bums me out when I find shows that that don't have them. Now, that said, I will say that like there are certain shows that like from beginning to end it is a continuous story. So it doesn't make sense to have a bunch of chapter markers in there. So I'm not going to go back and like just listen to this little part of the story again, for example, like reply all or something like one of those shows a little bit harder or less useful probably to have chapter markers. But for shows like ATP. ATP is a long form podcast, it's always two to three hours. I listened to it every week. And they kick, they cover probably five or six different topics in those two or three hours. And it's nice to be able to just jump in listen to Hey, you were talking about something new and the new iPhone OS or something, and that's what I want to hear. But I have a hard time remembering that that was that, you know, hour 23. But I can go back and I can find the chapter and I can just listen to that again. So that's it. That's all I have to say about chapter markers. Big
Travis :an, check them out. Awesome. Well, that wraps it up for this episode of Buzzcast. I'm going to send you somewhere new this week. If you're not yet subscribed to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel, I'll leave a link in the show notes. Make sure you go and do that because in addition to posting the video version of our Podcasting Q&A show, we also do a lot of just software tutorials like an 18 and a half minute deep dive into descript that was just published. But we're also going to start publishing videos walking through Different Buzzsprout features. So if you're not yet a YouTube subscriber, then make sure you go do that. And then if you're also not in our Facebook group, our Buzzsprout podcast community, then you can click and join that as well. But thanks for tuning in again for another episode and we'll catch you in the next
Alban :ne. And if you're looking for any content next week, be sure to check out flip it or sell it on