Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where we help, where I help you start and grow your
podcast, answering any podcasting questions along the way. That's right. Today is no different.
I am a little bit discombobbled today. I'm trying a few different things. I'm going live
on Instagram, which is kind of new for me.
Doing this with a beta version,
not even beta, alpha version of Ecamm Live that supports both wide and tall format.
It's a whole new thing.
It's a new process for me.
So if you caught the beginning of this video
and it wasn't exactly professional, that's why it's because I have to start
the whole Instagram live thing and it it's just interesting to do
because I've never I've not done that in a while.
So that's that's something that's going to be new.
The other thing today is you can join us backstage
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can just hang out and do other other fun stuff, other zoom stuff.
Just kind of hang out with us.
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right now, right now that comes to the studio, you can join us live. You can have a lot of
fun with us because we are live. We are going to be talking today about Apple podcasts.
That's right.
We're talking about something new that Apple podcast has done to allow us to create chapters
and links.
And that's something that's a little bit new for at least for Apple podcast.
You could before do Apple podcast, you could do chapters if you I believe you could do
chapters if you could.
No, no, no, you could not.
Maybe if you added in the RSS or in the MP3 tag, yes, you could.
But now they're allowing you to do it.
Actually, no, they're not.
This is all new, all new.
Forgive me, there's all sorts of apps do different things with the chapters.
And so Apple podcast is now going to allow you to to do podcast chapters in their chapters.
So it's chapters isn't anything that's really new.
We've had it for a while.
you could put them in your MP3 file.
And what would happen is it would show up and you can.
Some people may think of it as skipping your content.
People sometimes you may think, hey, I don't want chapters because
it's going to allow people to skip my content and skip
what I'm actually wanting them to hear.
But if you think about it, that's yes, it's going to allow them to skip.
It's going to allow them to skip. But.
At what point, like if it's something specific content,
And especially if you're gonna be doing a long podcast,
a long format where you're talking about
lots of different topics or subjects or whatever,
if people are only interested in topic Y,
then why make them listen through X, Y, and Z?
Let them skip to that point.
And so what I've done, and again,
the thing about that is they can skip around
and then maybe they're gonna skip my ads that are in there.
Well, yes, and they may do that anyways
because they can skip, they can push the 30 second forward
thing and skip your ads really easily.
So what I do to kinda combat that is I just put my ad
right at the beginning of my chapter,
so if they're gonna be listening to that chapter,
they're gonna at least hear that starting out.
Now, again, how you can provide chapters.
So the cool thing about the way that Apple Podcast
is implementing this is kind of the same way
that they did with transcripts.
So if you don't know,
transcripts have been around for a while.
The podcast 2.0 podcasting 2.0 has allowed you to create transcripts and chapters.
And this is nothing really new and even even links to it.
This is nothing really new.
But what Apple is doing is kind of the same thing that they did with the Apple podcast
transcripts is if you don't provide one via the podcast tag in your RSS feed, then they're
going to generate one for you.
Now just like that, you can opt out of that.
So I'll talk about that in a little bit.
But if you decide you don't want them to automatically generate chapters for you, then you can you
can go ahead and opt out of that.
Now I'm interested to see how these chapters work.
You know, for me, I usually put chapters in at like an intro.
So if you're looking at this podcast, usually it's introduction kind of where I'm doing
the little beginning part where I'm talking about the live backstage, which you can go
to at podcast answers dot com slash backstage or our voicemail number five seven four five
zero one four nine four five, which at the moment takes you live into the studio if you
want to hear that live. But I want to join us live and be able to call into the studio.
But and then I have one for the main content and then kind of one as I'm wrapping up with
the last thing, you know. So it's not super helpful necessarily for a podcast like this,
but we're we're if there's a podcast where you're talking about lots of different things
and you chapter those out, that can be helpful.
So so so podcast Apple podcast, they're going to automatically generate
a podcast or a transcript.
They already do that for you.
They're going to generate a chapter for you. There you go.
And and they're going to allow you to stop that if you don't want.
But you can also put your own in there and you can do this
by a couple of different ways.
You can provide in the episode description
a time code like 00 colon 00 colon 00 and include.
you're going to include at least three chapters.
But if you do that, and presumably if you do a words
on that same line, it's going to be the chapter title.
I believe I could not find any good documentation in the Apple podcast
documentation about how to title your chapters.
But it did say, like, put your timestamp in there is 00 colon 00 colon 00.
And then you have to have one at the very beginning
and then include at least three chapters.
You can also include it in your RSS tag with a podcast colon chapters tag
and a lot of podcast hosts support this.
I know captivate the one that I love and the one that I suggest
allows you to go ahead and put put that in really easily,
right in their their interface.
And if you want to check out captivate, you can go to podcast answers
dot com slash captivate, and that will take you to the
the area where you can check out captivate.
But so you can either do that in your RSS.
Feed with the podcast chapters tag or in the metadata.
I do three tag, which is that's that's been around forever.
That doesn't allow you to do any links in there.
The nice thing about Apple podcasts, the way that they're doing it,
as well as the podcast answers podcast answers.
Wow. Podcasting two point O is doing it as you can.
is you can have links in there.
So if you go into the chapters
and you see want to link out to something, you can link out to it
and then easily be able to go in there and and
and and link out to something different.
Now, what the nice thing about doing it in your RSS tag,
as well as your description,
as you can go back in and edit it really easily.
If you're just doing chapters in your ID three tags,
You do that on your computer before you upload to your media host.
And so by doing that, if you needed to add a chapter
or remove a chapter or whatever, change any chapters,
let's say you spelled it wrong, you're going to need to edit that file again,
re upload it again, and then go from there.
The podcasting 2.0 way of doing it with a podcast colon
chapters tag is you're linking out to an external file
so you can edit that file at any point.
You can go back into your podcast host and say,
Actually, I want to add a chapter right here and you can have it put in there.
And it's super easy. And then the next time people listen to it,
there's going to be more chapters in there. So it's a really genius way of adding
chapters into your your podcast. So that's the way that I would suggest doing it.
If you can is do it in your your your media host. And again, if you're if you're using
something like Captivate, which is the web, the podcast host that I use, you can go ahead and
and really easily right in their interface, edit those those chapters.
Now, one of the things that that Apple podcast is saying
that you should be doing is you should be including at least three chapters to.
So that way that that it makes it worth it for the people.
And I don't know if that's a limit.
And again, I don't know.
Some of the stuff is kind of yet to be seen with Apple podcast.
So I don't know if you're able to go in and I think it probably pulls the file
again, updates the chapters that they have for you.
But they say limit also to no more than six per hour.
So we'll have at least three chapters, but no more than six per hour,
because I think that they're saying that that's too many for people to
to follow through.
They also say keep chapters no shorter than two minutes.
So you should at least have a two minute
chapter in there to make it worth it for people to go in and select that.
They say use title casing, so in other words, just like you'd put your caps
in in every beginning of every word, they say the best case
is using title casing. Now, again, this is just Apple's Apple's rule, Apple's style guide.
So they're saying do this and also spell out numbers. So if you're going to be saying something
about six, then you're going to want to put S.I.X. If you're saying six, seven, then you're
going to say S.I.X. as E.V.E. And yes, I did six, seven. So you're you're welcome. Now,
the other thing that is kind of cool is what they're saying is if they're auto generating
for you, you can download a text file with chapter titles and timestamps that they're
creating. So you can go ahead and use that. Download it so you have it. You can also then
use it for whatever repurpose if you want to put it into. Let's say you're using the
same audio for YouTube. You can go ahead and put that in your YouTube description and have
YouTube then use those same chapters that Apple podcast created. Now you can turn this
this off in the Apple podcast connect. And this is just for the automated ones. So you
can uncheck that and it's going to take out anything. It won't actually then create or
display any automated chapters that they're creating for you. Uh, so, so that way, I,
again, I don't know the quality of these chapters. They may do too many, too few, cause you don't
really have control of them. They just do them on their own. But from the captioning
transcripts that they do, they do a pretty decent job. And so, so for me, I think I would
leave them on. Most of the time, I'm automatically creating chapters anyways in my things in
my episodes, but not most.
So some people that aren't and so you can you can turn this off if you want for the
auto generated ones. And again, if I would actually skip a day, then it would be OK because
it would go ahead and actually create those for me. They say for troubleshooting, you
need to have the transcripts turned on, too. So if you've turned the automatic transcripts
off on your podcast or can't create a transcript for your podcast episode, then it will not
chapters for this. It's going to be doing that based on that transcript that it generates from
the audio. They also say episodes shorter than 10 minutes won't have chapters involved in them.
So that's good to know. Right now, I'm just over 12 minutes in this episode. But it if I was under
10 minutes and they're not going to automatically generate chapters now again, I'm assuming that if
you're producing your own episode and you're producing your own files, then it is going to
actually go ahead and honor that fact that you're putting those in there. But I think it's just
automatically generate chapters for podcast episodes
that are under 10 minutes.
They also say trailers will not have chapters
as well as private feeds too.
So if you have your own private feeds in there,
they're not gonna generate 'em.
It's only gonna be things that are gonna be in podcasts
connect in Apple for public distribution.
Now, the next thing that we're gonna be talking about
that they have produced is what's called timed links.
time links are essentially ways that it can pop up on screen and have a link for this.
Now, before you get to giddy and excited about this, there's some shortcomings for this.
So you can they'll automatically generate them for you, which again, you can turn off.
And I think that I would probably turn this off. Or you can do links in your chapters.
So I would say that they could.
The reason I say you may want to turn them off is it's actually only going to generate
links for things like Apple Books, Apple Music, Apple Maps, News, Apple News, Apple Podcasts,
Sports, Stocks, TV and Shazam.
So all of the suite of things that Apple Podcasts creates or Apple creates is what you're going
to be able to link to is you won't be able to link to other things in in there.
So you can provide the links yourself
by adding them into this description
just like you did with the chapters.
You're gonna put a timestamp and a link,
and again, it's gonna have to be links
to Apple products, Apple things.
They will not put those popping up automatically
in your Apple Podcast when you're using
any other link like that.
Or the other way to put them in
is to use the podcast colon chapters,
like you're creating chapters,
and then put a link to that service
in the link to the chapter.
So again, the Podcasting 2.0 standard
allows you to create a chapter
with a beginning time and a title,
but it also allows you to put a link in there
and that allows you to link out to anything you want.
So if you're listening to another app,
I like Castomatic.
I really like Castomatic.
I'm on iOS for my Apple,
and I really like Castomatic.
They're doing a lot of new things,
a lot of things with the Podcasting 2.0 community,
And I like those.
And those links actually show up.
You can link to anything in there.
Apple Podcasts, again, you're gonna do the same way.
You're gonna create a chapter,
but you're going to put a link in there.
But it's only gonna show up if you're linking out to,
again, Apple Books, Apple Music, Apple Maps,
Apple News, Apple Podcasts, Apple Sports,
Apple Stocks, Apple TV, and I'm gonna call it Apple Shazam,
'cause that's really what it is now.
But again, if you're noticing something here,
there's a trend. All of those products that I'm listing are Apple. They have the words
Apple at the beginning of them. They're just going to be the Apple products that you're
going to be able to link to. Now, automatically how this happens and they say, again, I'm
not super clear on this because this is, I haven't seen it in action yet, but what they're
saying is automatically when you discuss another podcast, they may detect that you just detected
another or talked about another podcast and link to that in your pop up.
I don't know that I would like that, just because the fact that I don't
I want to have a little bit more control over what I'm actually linking out to
and are all of these things.
So I think for my podcast, I'm probably going to turn the automatic detection
or automatic links off just because I don't really want them
to automatically detect something else.
And I have a few questions, too, because what happens if your podcast
has a wildly similar title to something else.
I mean, if you just go search something like
let's talk or talk about it or smart talk or anything like that,
you're going to get 300, if not 3000 podcasts back.
How is Apple podcast going to know exactly which one that you're talking about?
So this is maybe where they're saying may automatically detect it,
because I'm wondering if they can't say this is definitively
the podcast that you're talking about, then they may not link to it.
So that's one of the good things, one of the things that you need to
to remember when when talking about Apple, as far as the links in Apple.
Now, the links are going to appear in iOS 26.2.
And again, you can opt out of auto generated podcasts
just like you can with chapters and with transcriptions.
You can do that by going to Apple pie or podcast, connect
Podcasts that podcast connects that Apple's dot com.
And so that's it, guys.
This is I'm interested to see see how exactly they're going to implement this.
I'm excited to see what it actually means.
I want to see it in production before we get too, too far on this.
But that being said, if you have any questions,
you want me to answer or discuss on this podcast,
feel free to call 574-501-4945. And that will get you to our voicemail. And then also, if you can
send it in via a form podcastanswers.com/ask, I would love to be chatting with you about questions
that you have for your podcast. I want to help you start and grow your podcast. So if you have
any podcasting questions, again, podcastanswers.com/connect. That'll get you in to my
DMs, if you will, and allow you to ask a question as well as calling my voicemail line 574-501-4945.
And that will get you into the voicemail. Have a great week and keep podcasting.