Until now if you wanted to add chapters to your podcast, you had to write the mp4chaps format by hand into a textfield. The Publisher now finally provides an easy-to-use interface to manage chapters that doesn’t require any knowledge about the underlying formats.
The new inferace makes it simple to import chapters from files. We currently support PSC (Podlove Simple Chapters), mp4chaps and Audacity Track Labels. Let us know if we don’t support your favorite program’s export format.
Module: Import/Export
Podcast import has been rewritten to make full use of Background Jobs. That way podcasts of any size can be imported without running into system resource restrictions for large podcasts.
Background Jobs
The jobs dashboard on the tools page now shows job statuses in realtime (refreshes automatically).
Adjusted background job duration parameters and made them configurable. The change of defaults aims to make better use of available cron time (normally 30 seconds per request), which can speed up long running background jobs dramatically.
Thanks again for your work!
I see that the new way of adding chapters might be better, especially for less “technically gifted” users.
However, the new approach makes adding chapters slightly more complicated for Hindenburg users. I’ll contact the Hindy team and ask them for a simple .txt export feature.
No file. That’s the point.
They offer “copy chapters as text”. This will put the chapter information in your clipboard. Then you simply paste it into Podlove. Now we can’t paste it anywhere anymore.
I’ve asked them to add an “export Chapters as .txt” feature. This should be simple.
Workaround:
Copy chapters information from Hindenburg
Create .txt file
Paste information into your own .txt file. Save it.
Import it into Podlove
Their format looks like this:
20.800 Chapter One "URL Title for One" <http://chapterone.com>
01:01.200 Chapter Two "URL Title for Two" <http://chaptertwo.com>
02:06.600 Chapter Three "URL Title for Three" <http://chapterthree.com>
1:03:39.508 Chapter Four "URL Title for Four" <http://chapterfour.com>
Exactly.
I think Hindy will add an “export chapters to .txt” feature. Then this would be solved. No need for you to change or revert anything.
I’ll keep you updated.
Update:
They have already responded and are willing to implement this feature.
Yes, it can be done. One question though: Which format do you want the text file in?
I knöw thät the söme öf the letters yöu tend to use, cän’t be säved in a pläin ASCII file.
So its the values Markers/Marker[@Time], Markers/Marker[@Title] and Markers/Marker[@URL] that matter with Markers/Marker[@Type] == "Chapter" (in fancy xpath notation).
(I had to add the breaks.) Looks good to me now.
However, the second chapter will not be imported. (Update: Any chapter that is not the first nor the last one.) I don’t know why. @ericteubert, any ideas?
And: Hindenburg creates the .txt without breaks in between chapters. In other words: All in one line. It’s a formatting thing. Podlove can’t read them that way. I’ve reported this to the Hindy team.
Might be a bug when the first chapter is not a 0:00:00. Need to check. Exporting software should have an option to always include such a chapter but so could the Podlove Publisher generate one if not there.
A chapter at 0:00:00 is not needed. I somehow made it work by now. But I don’t know how. I didn’t really change anything. Even my example above works by now.
By the way: mp4chaps defines a URL title. The thing in "" in the middle. What is it used for? The new chapters interface does not really use it? The URL title will be added to the chapter title.
Ah I just noted that. I guess it would enable presenting the Link to the User separately from the Chapter. This is uncommon in podcast apps and I am not sure this is explicitly covered by the mp4chaps format (which is itself rather loosely specified).
I took a second look at the Hindenburg-specific mp4chaps text export format and I think it would be a trap to support it. It is highly inconsistent. For instance, if you have a chapter title that contains a " character, the export format does not escape this character so it can’t be distingusihed from " characters that are used as delimiters for URL titles.
So I think we’ll stick to importing the Hindenburg project file as this does not need extra exporting AND it is an totally unambigous format to parse.
Import support for Hindenburg project files is coming in 2.5.1.
I’m not sure where they got their idea for the quoted url title format, but as it is I will actively discourage people from using Hindenburgs txt export because it is ambiguous. Just stick to the project files. We’re discussing if we will support url titles at all. For now, it seems unlikely as it is unclear how to implement it across all supported formats, especially MP4chaps.
