How I handle podcasts in Obsidian

Current situation - just listening

I use Pocket Casts for ages. According to the stats feature in the app, I started using it in March 2015 and listened to 147 days(!) of podcasts up till now. Wow!

However, I recently realized that I just listen. I usually don't take notes (which is normally quite hard as I listen to podcasts when I'm out and about) so I don't retain any knowledge I get from podcasts. Sometimes I make a quick note in my todo app or jot down something, but this is more the exception than the norm.

There are some podcasts where this is quite ok. When I listen to my American Football previews on Down Set Talk, I don't need any notes.

But I also listen to some content where it would be extremely helpful to conserve the knowledge and use it afterwards. So I guess I need a new workflow here.

Listening and bookmarking

I recently discovered Snipd, which is a podcast client with a lot of AI thrown in. Unfortunately, this only works for english podcasts right now, and I listen to a lot of German stuff. However, it also has this nice feature of making a snip (audio bookmark) using your headphones. So I can just triple-tap my earbuds when there is some interesting content and Snipd will mark it in the app.

It also creates AI notes out of these snips. These are accessible by a provided link. Currently I add this content to Readwise to annotate it further.

For now I ditched Snipd as Pocket Casts, my podcast player of choice, added the bookmark feature from Snipd in its latest beta. It's missing the AI features, though, but for bookmarking interesting parts while I'm listening this is enough for now.

Transcribing

Auphoniccan trigger Wit.aito generate transcripts for audio files/podcasts. You can upload any podcast to a new 'Production' of yours and process it. However, in the free tier this is limited to 2 hours/month. You can buy additional credits for around €2/hour.

Deepgramoffers $200 of free credits up-front and is solely focused on transcriptions. You can buy addional credits as well, quite cheap for $0.25/hour. It has a nice integration into Obsidian through the Audio Notes plugin. I have to test this further.

Taking notes in Obsidian

Persisting knowledge is the job of Obsidian. And there are some plugins which assist taking notes on podcasts that I want to try out:
- Audio Notes
- PodNotes

I create a new note for a podcast using PodNotes. This adds some metadata to the new note via the defined template. If there are already some AI notes from Snipd, I'll add those to this note via an Obsidian transclusion. Then I add some personal notes, if there are any.

The idea of this approach is to have a separation between auto-generated content and my own content, but I don't know if this is the way to go.