How I handle podcasts in Obsidian

Just Listening vs. Retaining Information

I used to 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 until 2024.

However, I then 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 made a quick note in my todo app or jot down something, but this was 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.

Listening and bookmarking

In 2024 I discovered then-new Snipd, which is a podcast client with a lot of AI thrown in. It just worked for english podcasts back then, but now supports german (and many other languages) as well. It has the nice feature of making a snip (audio bookmark) using the app or your headphones (or your smart watch). 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, which in turn gets synced to Obsidian.

Pocket Casts also implemented the bookmark feature later, but it's missing all the AI features.

Transcribing

There were several offers to transcribe podcasts in 2024:

Auphoniccould 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.

Deepgramoffered $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.

Today in 2026 I use Google Gemini or Perplexity to get written info out of podcasts if I don't use Snipd in the first place. This also works great for transcripts and summaries of tech talks.

Taking notes in Obsidian

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

I used to create a new note for a podcast using PodNotes. This added some metadata to the new note via the defined template. If there are already some AI notes from Snipd, I added those to this note via an Obsidian transclusion. Then I further added some personal notes, if there are any. The main idea of this approach is to have a separation between auto-generated content and my own content.

I don't follow this approach right now and I'll have to check if there is a better way for the future. Right now, I get the snips from Snipd (if there are any) together with a short summary from Readwise which is quite enough for the moment. There even is a dedicated Snipd plugin for Obsidian, but I didn't dig deeper into it yet.