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There has to be thousands upon thousands of podcast episodes being created with every single day. Yet there doesn't seem to be any way to just export a label track directly as a podcast chapters file.

This is wild, how many hours do people spend just to create the chapter file in some other way, instead of just doing it right there – since that's not possible?

Especially wild since Audacity has plugins. I kinda want to learn coding just to create that one single plugin…

Sorry if I've already posted about this before, it's just so strange to me that no one has done this before. All my gratitude to those who contribute to , no shade. I'm just puzzled.

@forteller This made me curious as to what you are talking about (as someone who has used Audacity in the past but never needed to make chapters).

I found this video, which explained to me its possible to add chapters in Audacity using labels, but then export that as a text file.

I guess a "chapter file" you refer to is in a slightly different format to the exported text file?

youtu.be/CX4Z4_hQwzY

@matt Yeah, I've seen that video twice (because the title made me forgot I'd seen it before). A title like that has to mean it tells you what to do to make a chapter file, right? Nope, he just tells you how to export the labels in a text file.

Attached you can see the difference, and you seem to have to do the conversion from txt to json manually, which is time consuming, and it's very easy to make a mistake in the formatting. I just don't get why this can't be automated.

@forteller @matt It should be trivial.

I made this in 20 minutes 100% based on your screenshot, so it might not work (I'm assuming the text is tab-separated, and that the line ending is LF because you don't strike me as a Windows guy)

As it is it only accepts the content of a single file each time, so think of it as a proof of concept.
A more useful thing for you would be a bash script doing the same for an entire folder or something.

altin.no/track2title/

altin.noTrack -> Chapters

@Torstein I love that you just went ahead and made something for @forteller to use. 🥰

The next step is to make the same but as an Audacity plugin, so you can export the new format directly. 😎

@matt Yes! Thank you, @Torstein, this is fantastic! I haven't had the time to try it yet, I'll let you know how it goes when I get the chance :)

@forteller @matt Yes, let me know if it works (or if it doesn't).
I have no idea about what formats are used by Audacity or the podcast thing, but the transformation used in the image you posted seemed simple enough.

@Torstein @matt I used your tool to make chapters for this episode borge.forteller.net/@BorgeFort

and it worked great! I don't think Castopod has support for showing chapters directly on the website, so you need to use a podcatcher to test it yourself.

Thanks a ton! If you want to look into making this a plugin for Audacity, that would be awesome and very helpful. But no pressure ;)

Børge

@Torstein Actually, even just a button on the page to save the output as a chapters.json file would be very nice! Is that doable? :D

@forteller I added a download link if that is more helpful than copying from the text field.