A script for automatically lowering the volume during radio advertisements and DJ announcements and turns the volume back up when songs are playing. It controls a Sonos speaker using the Soco-cli Python library when Tunein is being used.
If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
I'm not trying to be controversial, but if you remove profit how can the business continue to exist? And if terminating the business is your goal, why? People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
It's my livelihood. I'm not seeking sympathy, but I am curious.
Here's the thing. In an where ads get the volume cranked up, this seems like the natural blowback to that.
Good, bad, indifferent, adtech has become so hostile that users (myself included) have found ever more measures to excise it, because it feels compelled to show no restraint in its own appetites.
I'm old enough to remember when radio and TV adverts didn't comprise more than 15% of the total media stream, let alone online, where the visual real estate and the mid-stream extortion racket of context-daftness has gone mad (e.g. I want to watch a quiet modal jazz concert, but every 10 minutes a jarringly loud ad for Grammarly or Tide is injected at near earbleed volume) makes it that I pretty much download the media, put it up on my media server to play it, because the ads just make me want to (and actually do in 95%+ of cases) blacklist any brand annoying enough to go this route.
No one wants to moderate because the stakes to get more marketshare/eyeballs 'demand' it, just creates the incentive to avoid it. Google succeeded for years on less intrusive, more directed ads...then they decided to stop 'stop being evil' and took the DoubleClick/Taboola turdscape route along with everyone else. Now there is zero sympathy from listeners/viewers, because I would argue, the advertisers offer them no reason to.
Is that a rationalization? Maybe. But it's also a sincere observation.
I thought I hated ads and that the personal recommendations were creepy. Then Instagram ads crossed the uncanny valley by showing me stuff I actually want to buy. (What a concept!)
Puzzlingly, Google/YouTube should know way more about me than Meta, but most of the ads I get from them suck.
If radio ads weren't full of yelling, car-honking, sirens and overly attention-grabbing things, people wouldn't care as much. Same as websites putting up huge, 5MB-big popup ads and not liking that people want to adblock them. Especially worse, is when the ads are far louder than the content itself.
Some podcasters seem to have have realized this problem and are curating ads better. Also with almost all the ones I listen to, the ads are presented live by the host, not pre-recorded by an annoying voice actor, which makes them a bit more bearable. There are also a couple of youtubers who've found creative ways to integrate and connect ads to what they're presenting, one channel has perfected this to the point that I actually enjoy watching the ads because he finds really funny ways of presenting them. So it's definitely possible to make it better.
> There are also a couple of youtubers who've found creative ways to integrate and connect ads to what they're presenting, one channel has perfected this to the point that I actually enjoy watching the ads because he finds really funny ways of presenting them. So it's definitely possible to make it better.
Corridor Crew on YouTube does this very well.
They are a lovely gang of VFX people. Highly recommend watching some of their videos to anyone who hasn’t.
Yeah. Some Youtubers have gotten so sly with their integration that once I realize that I'm in an ad I also realize that they started teeing it up 30 seconds earlier. I admire the craft of that type of transition.
And then I skip it. Unless the presentation is compelling and interesting for it's own sake.
It's a social issue and you should petition for the change you'd like to see.
For example in the UK, advertisers must comply with the Advertising Standards Authority code [1], and section 4 includes:
> Radio only – Advertisements must not include sounds that are likely to create a safety hazard, for example, to those listening to the radio while driving.
Which while open to interpretation, this would likely include any sirens likely to be confused with a genuine siren.
Or:
> Television only – Advertisements must not be excessively noisy or strident.
( That one might raise an eyebrow to anyone familiar with the long running "Go Compare" campaign! )
Of course these codes are always written in a way that's woolly and often adverts are only banned after complaints have been made.
But the framework is there for standards to be written and upheld. It relies however on people being willing to put in time and effort to complain when standards are broken, and there needs to be effort made to tighten those standards in some areas to stop standards slipping, although in general standards have been tightened rather than loosened over the years.
If your experience is very different, consider that it may be worth spending time organising a campaign group to lobby the FTC (or FCC?) to tighten their rules, or organise a group to put in complaints to organisations which have similar "voluntary" codes such as the BBB and also pressure the BBB to tighten their rules to have guidelines prohibiting such noises.
Change doesn't happen for change sake, it requires organisation and action, but even a handful of people can effect huge change with a concerted effort.
Nice, yup that's a great point. Here in Canada it would be the CRTC. Yeah, I could write them. I've reported spam and related stuff to them before but got no response. Perhaps things are different in the marketing/advertising side of things. Guess I'll just have to find out! :)
Looking at the script, it's just lowering the volume, possibly so it's at or below the average volume of the rest of the content (on a Sonos speaker using TuneIn).
One of the things wrong with our industry, inspired by legislation made by people with no technical background, is that the peak volume of a commercial can not be louder than the peak volume of the surrounding program.
So some in the industry processed the commercials into audio bricks, with the peak audio level at or below what's required. But the average audio of the commercial was much higher than the average audio of the programming. While it's legally lower volume, it's perceived as higher volume.
While this script is made for TuneIn via Sonos, I think the philosophy of louder average volume has migrated as a regular feature in streaming. I also think it's why many artists on ad-supported sales/streaming platforms process their tracks into bricks, so their track is not perceived as lower volume and less energy.
I can't speak for the person who coded this, but I think they are just correcting the legacy exploit, and not trying to outright remove the advertisements. (The example they give lowers the volume to "15", not "0")
Radio is famous for very annoying ads that are often louder than the program's content. Every time I hear that 1800 Cars for Cash song, I turn off the radio. As far as DJs go, around here SF Bay Area, a lot of the stations are part of that male/female first name radio stations (Alice, Dave, Bob, etc) and the "DJ" is some recorded person saying like "How's it going, [fill in city name]. How about those clowns in congress huh. Here's some more music hits of the genre you are listening to."
> If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
Unless the broadcaster cares about their show and wants people to hear it. If enough people care enough, someone (perhaps the broadcaster themself) will fund the cost of broadcasting.
There are broadcasters that don't have adverts and apply this model successfully. Crucially, the definition of “success” is that the audience and broadcaster can continue to enjoy the show, not that the broadcaster makes a huge profit.
To invert a Rule of Acquisition: “Anything worth doing is worth doing at cost”.
I spent 12 years at KMFB FM on the Mendocino coast (show host & Control Op), and it was a rare commercial station that had specialty shows where the host would have to get their own advertisers to be on the air.
The problem starts when ads are significantly louder than the rest of the content in order to be an "ear catcher"..... Now radio is much better than other forms of media (looking at you cable... and now some streaming services that are on the take from both sides) but its also the fact that ads have become steadily more intrusive over the last decade(+).
My real hope is that there is a movement back to "sponsored content" and more subtle ads... with less ads overall.... i.e "this hour is sponsored by <insert Brand>, check them out on <insert text>". This is probably never going to happen as there is now a constant need to sell and more expensive ads does push out smaller businesses.
Not sure there is really an answer here but I think moderation can help here
> i.e "this hour is sponsored by <insert Brand>...
Commercial station KRKQ in Telluride, CO, does this, and it sounds amazing.
WDRE (now WPTY), WLIR-FM and WBON on Long Island, NY, tried it in 2005, and it did not generate the revenue they were expecting. But it's 17 years later-- I think they were trying an idea that was ahead of it's time.
I will remove ads whenever it is technically feasible to do so. If it's not technically feasible to do so, then I'll avoid the ads by simply not engaging with the content at all. There are no circumstances where I find media existing with ads to be superior to the media not existing, so if ad blocking were to kill radio, then I'm perfectly fine with that.
Yeah, there was a YouTube channel I'd watch, but the guy started having sponsored ads in the middle of his videos. I just stopped watching the channel. Oh well, missing out on some cool content, whatever. I'm not going to listen to some propaganda about some VPN or Grammarly or counseling services or whatever other stupid crap I have zero interest in.
I just hit the "L" key a few times and forward by 10 seconds for ads that are part of the content. uBlock origin blocks all of the youtube ads that aren't part of the "broadcast."
I don't want to be advertised to. I think ads are unethical and consider that business model to be unacceptable. I suggest you find a new one because it's become increasingly clear to me that I'm not alone.
> If you remove ads then there's no reason for the broadcaster to keep going.
How is this any different than changing the tv channel (...or radio station) when an ad comes on, which has been the de facto consumer behavior for over half a century?
We process visual and audio data differently. No website or or magazine is going to trick me into thinking someone’s at the door by playing a dry doorbell sample over reverb for the rest of the ad.
Radio (and TV) are uniquely obnoxious in their use of instinctive audio cues to demand attention by making us go on alert.
How is not? There is a commercial I've been seeing a lot during sporting events. I think it's some sort of insurance but I have no idea. All I know is multiple times a day the ad plays the default iPhone text message alert and it pisses me off.
That sort of shit needs to shut down. I think only sirens played on radio ads might be worse.
I thought the claim was that all ads are obnoxious, so singling out radio for ad-killing efforts is, IDK, morally wrong.
My point was that radio ads are uniquely obnoxious because of a combination of the way we process audio signals and radio stations’ apathy about intentionally irritating ads.
I’ll grant it’s not a moral failing on the part of sound waves. It’s 100% the broadcasters who see short term profit from “more effective” ads, who then have no right to complain when people are irritated enough to develop filters for the ads.
Something I'm honestly curious about....I can understand the need for advertising, but why do DJs talk so much? I would much prefer radio to have only music and ads. Living in Japan in the 1990s, I completely gave up on radio because the talking:music ratio was about 2:1.
> Each year, ASCAP processes trillions of performances of ASCAP music. Whenever it makes sense economically, we conduct a census survey, or complete count, of performances in a medium. For media that fall under our census surveys (for example, the large majority of network TV performances and over 2000 broadcast radio stations monitored by Luminate Data, LLC, formerly MRC Data, LLC), ASCAP seeks to pay on every surveyed performance.
> Where a census survey is impractical, we conduct a sample survey, meaning that we pay royalties based on a representative cross-section of the performances on that medium.
This suggests to me that for major radio stations, the strategy of "more talk, less music" will reduce royalties—and that your strategy might only work at a smaller station.
Also, ASCAP seems to govern only the rights to the composition. Most radio stations play from recordings. Do the record labels (or whoever collects for them) also utilize a similar sampling strategy?
I'll be honest I love radio as a medium but I'm either listening to a BBC station like Six Music which are ad-free to begin with or enthusiast-run stations like Radio Caroline which tend to air adverts which are more subtle and pared-back, I genuinely can't enjoy anything with anything more than the bare minimum of adverts in it having enjoyed advertising-free forms of radio.
It wouldn't be as bad if half the ads didn't have all the obnoxious hyperactive qualities of a toddler with a recorder but 'irritate your audience until the fact your ads are irritating becomes a meme among the general public' seems to be the go-to strategy with a lot of radio advertising in my neck of the woods.
It’s been a while since I listened to commercial radio, but it seemed like commercials were at a higher volume than music. Adjusting volume can be useful to keep ads from being jarring.
(Also used to work as a DJ, but not since the nineties…)
If your business model involves annoying us, we'll find a way around it. This is YOUR problem, not ours. Find a better business model or go out of business.
I subscribe to a local community radio which is completely funded by listener subscriptions (but I think they got a nice big injection of cash a couple of decades ago when they sold their 'name' to a commercial station, and they've been able to do a lot with that lump sum over the years).
I actively dislike commercial radio, it just pushes junk music, junk lifestyles, superficial bullshit life distraction. It's worthless and if advertising money dried up and they died it would be a net gain to society. I'm sure, however, some are less gutter trash than what I've described, and I certainly hope yours is too.
The number of people even capable of using this, let alone the number likely to use it, is infinitesimal.
People seem to have a grudge against radio and I honestly don't know why.
Can't speak for the radio in your area but in mine it's a total waste of spectrum. Terrible audio quality, eaten up with ads or utterly inane bumpers, and playing the same garbage every single day. My choices are rap that sounds the same as it did twenty years ago, rock songs that are literally the same as twenty years ago, the morning show with the two stupidest people I've ever heard, or NPR where I get to learn for an hour about how the new constitution of Nowheristan now has a section on water usage rights vis-a-vis goats vs sheep.
Theoretically - this script doesn't actually impact your ad rev; in fact you'd be more likely to have longer listener time, given the listener isn't switching it off or to a different frequency when the ad roll hits. So, more ads overall.
Technically speaking, I really shouldn't have a problem with ads.
But between the actual psychological tricks that often come across as trashy once you acquire a distaste/realization of them, and the general unenforcement of false advertising law, monopolistic conditions favoring ads campaigns/brand awareness over quality or reputation, refusal of companies to turn down lowest scamming denominator dollars, ads are effectively venom to any average consumer.
One of the major contributing factors to market inefficiency, I'd argue. Advertising shouldn't be such a blatantly untrustworthy, scammy method of extracting wealth from people for questionable valued services/products, but it usually turns out that way.
I think one problem is the known/unknown? practice to lower the overall gain by a few dBs on the broadcasters side when playing music to be able to regain attention for advertisment.
Radio is different due to the safety issues it raises. If they crank up the volume or engage in similar practices in an attempt to get attention, they by definition are distracting the listener. That's not the worst thing if you're watching TV, but much of the audience for radio is driving or working. It should be obvious what's wrong with practices designed to distract drivers in heavy traffic and workers carrying stuff up ladders.
Oh man, I have a story to tell here. Some years ago my favourite radio station started airing a new commercial for a car glass repair shop. Commercial started with a loud tyre screeching noise followed by a loud car honk and finally loud car crash noise. Every effing time I panicked, usually immediately put my foot off of gas pedal and probably once or twice started to brake. Idiots 100%.
If you are the type of person who only does something when it benefits you, I can understand why you would see things this way. Profit and personal gain are not the only motives that other people have for their actions. Sometimes people do things for the sake of enjoying them. Some really crazy people actually do things to help improve the world, at their own personal expense, with no tangible benefit to themselves.
If I want to come at this from a capitalist perspective, you are not entitled to other people's time, attention, or money. You are not entitled to a job as a radio broadcaster supported by revenue from advertisements that people find obnoxious. If the market won't support your business model, it's on you to find another business model, it's not on the market to support your failed model.
> If I want to come at this from a capitalist perspective, you are not entitled to other people's time, attention, or money.
Yup - This is a result of making the advertisers your true customer rather than me, the listener. In the meantime, that complete willingness to sell me as a product, and the lack of any existing contract, means that I am utterly entitled to remove any/all ads that you might embed in your product. I don't have to listen to the trash - you're yelling into the void, I can choose to cover my ears.
I understand that mass broadcast communication (radio, OTA tv) started going down that route because it's hard to limit the audience of a mass broadcast to charge a fee - but I'm not all that sympathetic to where the industry has ended up.
Frankly... I don't really know that I would mind if most of the commercial stations went out of business. It would be nice to make space for more content outside of the "top hits of [____]" and a blathering DJ. I'd like to see more stations act like NPR or college radio stations.
Do I love the NPR donation campaigns? Nope.
Do I donate? Yup. Because it means I'm still the customer.
Would I throw a couple bucks at a station to play curated playlists in different genres with no ads or interruptions? Probably. I used to throw donations at grooveshark DJs back in college for exactly that - I found a boatload of good music (mostly older titles) that way.
I stopped listening to the radio about 15 years ago because of how obnoxious the ads had gotten. I haven’t started up again. I can get ad-free content in numerous ways (paying, ad blocking, creating it myself, etc.). This reminds me of people in areas where tobacco is grown moaning about how laws limiting public smoking would put them all out of jobs. Yeah, that doesn’t really make the case for why we should keep it.
I subscribe (i.e. pay a yearly fee) to a local community radio station (which has an amazing range of music, and is 80% of my music intake). I generally like the announcers, and the sponsorship announcements are often things I'm interested in. But sometimes I just want music (like when I'm exercising). So there's a use case for you.
CBC Radio doesn’t have ads and it’s just the best ever. But it also doesn’t have expensive hosts or music to license.
I wonder if radio stations can become much cheaper to run if all the expensive hosts become podcasters and music gets played on Spotify or Apple instead.
I recently retired after a 42 year career in broadcast radio (at six different stations), and the two non commercial stations I worked at had "underwriting" which is kind of like a commercial, but legal under FCC rules.
I listen to a station that speaks calmly and carefully. The music is louder and any advertisements are spoken by the DJ without yelling. That is my goal to have more like this. I donate to them.
I was a treasurer for a not for profit radio station. We made the money to cover our costs through other services and we had special licensing arrangements that made it cheaper for us to broadcast.
Of course, when a right wing government got in they halved the number of frequencies available to the community and sold our frequency to a for profit who was marketing to young women and teens.
1) The statement "you matter" (call it X) is not the same as "you deserve a job in radio." (Y)
2) I expect (but do not have proof) that the readers of Hacker News, or a sample of western society generally, would more strongly support X statement than Y.
I did not say, but I will say now: I agree with X and not Y. I also don't believe that you deserve not to have a job in radio.
I initially wrote that out because it seemed to me that you were equating X and Y. You contested someone's apathy towards a threat to your job with a statement that you exist. Because I think that (1) and (2) are distinct, I didn't find your reply convincing. I hoped I would convince you of the same, or that you would respond with some insight I had yet to consider, which might change my own perspective.
It’s funny because broadcasters have notmalized ads at +6 dB compared to the rest of the radio.
It’s actually measured in LUFS, and it’s normalized worldwide for radio, podcasts, TV, movies, and commercials, so that commercials are louder.
LUFS measures the loudness, which is not exactly the same as volume - it makes quiet moments louder so that everything can be heard while the car engine runs, but the drawback is limited dynamic range, which is not important on podcasts but a little more important in music.
It’s double-funny that we can normalize LUFS and we’re still stuck with movie dialogs inaudible and the sound effects earth-shattering. I wish VLC had a better loudness processor, I don’t succeed to configure it to keep the whole movie at the same volume, whether they’re speaking or using automatic guns.
> I wish VLC had a better loudness processor, I don’t succeed to configure it to keep the whole movie at the same volume, whether they’re speaking or using automatic guns.
Probably won’t help you if you’re using VLC, but most of the streaming services now have multiple audio tracks in the same menu that would switch to another language called “<Language> - Reduce loud noises” which is pretty much that. I just find it inconvenient as an apartment dweller that the default is to blast the volume during any action sequence.
> It’s funny because broadcasters have normalized ads at +6 dB compared to the rest of the radio.
In the US, the loudness rule was made by politicians who had no technical background.
What they came up with was that the loudest part of the commercial can not be louder than the loudest part of the program surrounding it.
Broadcasters were quick to compress and limit the commercial audio into a brick, and normalize it just below the "100%" of the programming. The end result was a much, much louder commercial, that was technically a lower peak volume (but much higher average volume).
The law to lower the peak volume permits a higher average volume, and that has been exploited.
>It’s funny because broadcasters have notmalized ads at +6 dB compared to the rest of the radio.
This has actually be regulated against by the FCC. While the FCC is pretty much a feckless shell of an org, there are rules and ways to make complaints for their violations[0]
Would something like the OP linked script be possible for Netflix (and the like)? I hate that the audio is so much quieter than the effects, and it feels insane that this isn't configurable, either at the hardware level (TV) or software level, let alone a scripted hack.
Here's a great post from a post-production audio mixer explaining the many convoluted steps that go into delivering a final mix with correct loudness specs to end users. tldr, there's a lot of room for error.
This is great. I wish there was a way to limit the volume on Alexa devices for different services, especially Spotify. I like to fall asleep to podcasts, but it wakes my girlfriend up when the commercials start (especially iHeartRadio commercials!), so I either have it so low I can barely hear or I have to fall asleep to rain/ocean sounds.
Since podcasts are just MP3s, why not just play them on your phone or laptop or PC and normalize volume? You could even edit the files to remove ads/intro music.
SponsorBlock is just a collection of timestamps relating to sponsored content and other annoyances. It should add support for audio only content if it doesn't alteady have it.
They definitely can. I listen to a podcast about indie horror games on Spotify and they regularly insert an ad that sounds like someone cranked the gain and compression to 11.
I used this API or a similar one long time ago when sonos first came out.
The script that I wrote was completely different, I had it do text to speech from people tweeting an account.My friends would use it to make fun of people while we were playing video games. I also used it to always play "Bone Thugs and Harmony - It's The First of the Month" every morning on the first of the month.
This is even more important for classical music stations. Most people think that classical music should be quiet, but do you think 100 piece orchestras are quiet? Classical music sounds a lot better when you crank up the volume.
Classical is also mixed quieter to give it a larger dynamic range. So when you set the radio volume appropriate for the music, the DJs and ads are insanely loud.
Local college radio and other small stations tend to be great. Sure the music won't be custom tailored by either "what past-you liked" or neural networks expressly designed to increase Sweden's internal revenue, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the experience of listening all the same. As an extra plus you're likely to get relevant information on local news and events too.
> Sure the music won't be custom tailored by ... neural networks expressly designed to increase Sweden's internal revenue
hilarious take! I have found that any perfect recommendation takes the joy out of music listening for me. I feel like the highs and lows of good vs. bad songs are taken away and then its just a constant stream of background music.
They're few and far between, but a good radio station make this a non-issue. KEXP in Seattle is phenomenal; I listed to them just as much as Spotify or my local collection.
You could, but it's basically an echo chamber of music. I know services offer discovery, but I often switch songs instantly, whereas if its on the radio, I'm forced to listen to it, and songs often grow on me.
I like my collection, but I want it to grow, and over the years my musical tastes have matured and changed as I've discovered and listened to more varieties of more genres.
Something I've explained to my kids is that you need to know what you don't like in order to better refine and describe what you do like - and this means listening to music that doesn't 'spark joy', because it's educational, and I care about my musical knowledge and journey. Listening to music selected by someone else allows that journey to continue and branch off into unexpected places.
This is needed desperatly for regular TV. On some channels ad volume is much higher then mov volume so when ads start during chillex movie you get totally stressed.
My Toshiba TV has that feature built-in - they call it "TruVolume". It detects sudden increases in the program's volume, and adjusts accordingly. You can turn the feature on or off. I think it may also turn the volume up when the program's volume goes down.
Along with uBlock, there's nice extension called SponsorBlock that uses crowdsourcing to block in-content ad placements.
edit: Did not notice this was already mentioned. Sorry!
I have always wrestled with the ethics of adblocking YouTube. If am subscribed to a channel, that means the content in that channel has value for me. And it is only fair that I provide some value to the content creators in return. Otherwise it is theft.
Anyways this is my reasoning. Hence as much as I find ads to be annoying, I put up with them. I am considering cancelling my Spotify subscription and using the saving to subscribe to YouTube. I haven't done it yet.
At what point is it considered theft though? If I refuse to look at an ad when it plays is it theft? If I get distracted and not watch it for half the time it runs, is it half theft?
If I watch the whole thing and don't actually click through, is that theft?
There's no contract that I've signed that demands my full attention is on the ad. So, half my attention is ok? A quarter? How about none?
Is it enough that I know so and so company is behind the specific ad without me knowing what the ad is about but just realizing it's to sell me their product? Is that enough?
But that's not my problem. That's the content creator's problem for choosing to get paid by advertisers and releasing the content for free mass consumption.
They picked the model - they must deal with the consequences of it.
One of the most obvious consequences is that they have zero right to any of the audience's time, attention, or money. They have entered no contract with the viewer at all.
Frankly - I'd very much rather see a return to viewer funded media. Stop wrapping me up like a product to be auctioned off. Make content I want to watch and ask for fair compensation from me.
If you can't find enough people willing to pay... your content probably doesn't need to exist.
Act like NPR and man up - ask me for my money. Put on content that's worth me opening my wallet.
Cool. So for now, we can have third party tools that silence these ads and these content creators still get paid. At the point where the advertisers don't like this, then things can change. If they change enough, I'll choose a different platform.
> I have always wrestled with the ethics of adblocking YouTube
have you considered the ethics of the ads themselves? Ads are all too often nonconsensual, manipulative, and harmful. They're designed to exploit us. You should respect yourself enough to avoid them when you can.
Adblocking seems very distinct from theft to me, but thankfully even that is irrelevant with SponsorBlock. Those sponsorships don't pay via impression and only the channel themselves could really try to track impressions anyway.
You're free to use SponsorBlock and save so much time, brain space, and frustration, without worrying about altering the creator's pay at all. I don't see why you wouldn't do it.
At this point I've got actual emotional/stress responses to segues in videos. It's ridiculous. At least SponsorBlock saves me a good number of ads and gives me a way to do something when an ad spot isn't skipped.
It may not alter their pay immediately but if enough people start using SponsorBlock, it seems like a logical conclusion that the sponsors will see their ROIs drop and will start paying less for sponsored content.
Only if you were actually going to be influenced to buy the thing in the first place. And it's not like the various bits of advertising from a sponsorship go entirely unnoticed in many circumstances, with various requirements to add text ads to video descriptions and pinned comments.
If you're looking to be actually informed - rather than manipulated - you're not missing out on much with SponsorBlock.
Not to mention I've never actually seen anything both potentially useful and novel-to-me show up in a YouTube sponsorship anyway. It mostly seems to be full of companies with established models looking for ways to boost their adspend even higher after they've tapped out other avenues.
I subscribe to YouTube premium and one of the great features is that creators get significantly more money from my views than from an adsupported user. So every monetized video that I view helps them out a bit more. That along with ad free viewing and YouTube music make it the best value of anything I subscribe too and would be my last service to cancel.
You can subscribe to Youtube Premium to remove ads, but not in-video sponsorships of course. A lot of prominent creators have banded together in the Nebula subscription service [1], where they put their video without ads and sponsorships.
And you can get a great deal on nebula+curiosity stream too. I think I pay like under $20 for the year for both solely to watch Patrick H Willems and Thomas Flight videos and support a YouTube alternative.
It makes sense to cancel Spotify in favor of YouTube Premium since YouTube Premium includes both YouTube Music (music streaming service, like Spotify) and ad-free YouTube videos. It looks like YouTube Premium is a little more expensive than Spotify ($12 vs $10).
I think they were talking about SponsorBlock, which was mentioned on another same-level comment. Probably just didn't realize this was a separate sub-chain (or whatever you call it) without that context.
I've been using uYou+[0] & AltStore for about 6 months (since I switched to iOS from Android & Vanced) and I haven't had any problems with it. It has both SponsorBlock & normal ad block.
My understanding is there are laws about maximum broadcast volume, at least in the U.S.
In general, it's not that the overall volume is louder on advertisements / talking, it's that the compression / limiting makes it seem louder. Music - even heavily compressed modern music - still needs some dynamics, so it generally feels quieter.
It used to be* that this was a requirement for Television (in the US). It seems that has gone so unenforced that nobody cares and just jacks the ad volume up.
I wonder if there's a requirement for radio as well.
Important takeaway from the linked article: "No specific penalties are given"
So there is a regulatory framework and, as the article describes, compliant technical means should be in place for devices sold in the respective market.
The open question is, how will this be applied in practice as well as how will this extend to radio and why not, to online services such as streaming platforms?
Unfortunately doesn't help for the podcasts where they speak about their "sponsor" halfway through, taking up a minute of your life to tell you about NordVPN or whatever.
Is there anything along this vein using ML to actually detect speech vs music (and tag or strip the speech)? Won't work for every situation (reggae radio tends to play music in the background while the presenter is talking, and some ads have music), but I can't imagine it would be the hardest thing to work out.
Have a look at MythTV - it works really well, though doesn't use ML as much as a combination of signals the often occur when an ad starts (e.g. blank frame, watermark disappears, jump in volume).
This won't be relevant for TuneIn (since it's Internet Radio), but you could probably do something similar to this on some FM channels by reading the RDS[1] messages accompanying the broadcast. That would depend on the channel signaling advertising, however, and I'm not sure that's normally included in RDS.
Just delay the stream by a few seconds and process before you play it. You could simply do this by inserting some filler audio in the front, or slightly shifting frequency lower until enough of a buffer was built.
I've used an app on Android for Spotify called ad-free that does something similar. I think it polls the notification list and somehow gets info on the currently played song, and if the notification is a link to something being advertised, then volume is set to 0. Pretty neat.
The loudness war already has squashed dynamic ranges so much that music and commercials are both pretty thick blocks of sound. It would be hard to put a limiter into the signal path that would adequately block the commercials and leave the music untouched
Probably not. Although it might be easily implemented in hardware, I think most solutions currently are software.
The crux is to pick the loudness threshold and the adequate time-window for Real Time analysis/processing.
On our radio, the "Now Playing" is always frustratingly far behind. It's amazing that yours is real-time enough that you can adjust the volume based on it.
What's the point? They'll stop doing their playlists if they ads stop penetrating.
You can already make your own playlists or use those created by non-radio people.
I only ever listen to radio while driving and I've discovered at least two artists I wouldn't otherwise ever come across. (Shameless plug of Sean Wayland's album Australian Rhythm Changes)
This is purely reliant on the TuneIn API providing song info, and that your radio station is setting that song info, which doesn't happen on the radio stations I listen to. Also, easy to defeat by setting 'track' to (in this case) anything while the presenter is talking/ad is running.
For automated stations it should happen (nearly) instantly. Most "nicer" radios have RDS[1] built into them and high latency would be confusing to users, so updating it quickly is part of having a nice listener experience.
