How to Add Chapters to a Podcast
MacOS: I ditched a lot of conversational podcasts early on. They become boring for a few minutes, I try to find the next good snippet with 30 second skips, give up and delete the episode. But I’m not moving away from Scriptnotes – because even if the presenters can walk away or discuss insider topics that are not important to me, I can go straight to the beginning of the next topic. This is because the producer adds chapter titles to the show description. This is why you podcast creators should add chapter titles to your podcast. And Forecast is the best free app for that.
While still in free beta, Forecast already works great if you prepare your episode a bit in your editing software. Place markers at the beginning of your chapters before exporting, and Forecast will see them and ask you what to name each of them. Name your chapters, save and upload to your publishing platform. Tell your platform to extract the ID3 data from the mp3 file.
Forecast also encodes your podcast to mp3 at up to 128kbps (typical high podcast bitrate used even by audiophile shows like Radiolab ). You can attach an episode cover and a chapter cover. Forecast even warns you if it detects a long pause, if you accidentally left a gap where the ad should have been placed. This small amount of conscious additional features is typical of developer Marco Armenta, who previously created Instapaper and Overcast (the best podcast player for iOS ).
But if you do not prepare the audio file for editing, you will have to manually enter the time codes. And Forecast is sloppy in this matter. When I tested it, the manual interface worked with errors: some time codes were not saved unless I entered them in a very specific way, and some duration counters were never displayed accurately. As Arment warns, Forecast is still in beta testing.
For a longer exploration, check out Aaron Dowd’s written instructions andvideo demonstration . (Dowd is powered by the Simplecast podcast publishing platform.) Or read an in- depth overview on the Six Colors tech blog .
Forecast is a serious contender to Podcast Chapters , a $ 20 app that has average reviews on the App Store that mention a few serious bugs. At the very least, if Forecast fails for you, you’re wasting your money. And if you’re on Windows, we previously recommendedChapter and Verse apps (free) and Podreel ($ 24.45).
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