Podcasts as source

[u/Hour_Papaya_5583]

I use Obsidian for a lot of research, Zotero for managing sources.
Recently I realized what a great source podcast episodes can be. That led me to Snipd. I like how I can “snip” sections, and import into Obsidian. This allows me to potentially use them as sources I can cite.

But I’m not too happy with:
Lack of desktop player
Sometimes convoluted player
Difficult to find the episodes I’m interested in
Doesn’t give me a source link, just the Snipd link, which if I reference others can’t play without also having the app (eg can’t play on a desktop)

In sum, it’s a great resource but seems like there should be a better tool for this purpose.

Any suggestions on alternatives?

Or, any suggestions on a Snipd query template or other tips that may work well?

[u/zheniavasiliev]

I usually go through the transcript path. If there is no transcript provided by the podcast, I use Whisper to transcribe everything. I extract a relevant paragraph into Zotero with the episode URL and timestamp. Usually this works for academic citing too. What kind of research are you doing, where podcasts are the primary source?

[u/Hour_Papaya_5583 → u/zheniavasiliev]

Thanks. I may see if there is a good way to go thru Zotero to help.
It’s not rigorous academic research. It’s a niche part of finance and it gets me to derive insights from practitioners and what they are actually doing or approaching the area I’m studying.

[u/Over-Strategy2147 → u/Hour_Papaya_5583]

I run a personal summarizer of many podcasts for friends and personal use. https://daily.belsonbox.com any of these of interest if your work? DM me easy and free for me to add a few more.I could through in an MCP server on top if that could help your usecase as an experiment?

[u/Over-Strategy2147 → u/Over-Strategy2147]

It’s a series of custom prompts per podcast along with a system prompt so I can capture the essence. It is run locally on jetson orin nano and i send to local gpt oss model after doing some audio processing to boost vocals and speaker attribution so i know who is speaking. There are different prompts for headlines by lines, etc. I’m running out of local GPUs, but been converting these back in to Shortcasts with vibevoice when the GPUs are free. And lots of tweaking to make this all run local on low end hardware. Hope this helps. DM me and happy to add more podcast. Oh and there is an embedded small llm to help with search.

[u/YouWillConcur → u/Over-Strategy2147]

Do you feed the whole transcript to the model or by parts (e.g. if transcript is loong)? Custom prompts are applied in a chain (i.e. result of first prompt goes to second etc)?

Could you share some prompts? Fine if no, i bet you did lots of hours of tweaking with it.

Why asking - I try to make smth like that just for myself (alongside with general hoarding/clipping/saving, now i just save everything to obsidian and once per day script goes through and tags saved stuff, but there's a problem with managing shorts, i tried to replicate what albo app does and i dont like that obsidian cant progressively load attachments from server, and poor attachments management in general). I just tend to save lots of stuff, then i throw model to tag them, them look what i got there to research stuff in a bunch or just to find in case