We dive into the new features from Apple Podcasts: automated chapters and timed links. Apple is generating these automatically, though you can opt out. Learn how to add your own chapters using time codes in the description or the podcast:chapters tag. We also examine Apple's style guide, which suggests including at least three chapters and spelling out numbers. Crucially, the new timed links are restricted to linking only to Apple products such as Apple Music, Apple Maps, and Apple Books. Tune in for details on utilizing or disabling these updates!

Welcome to Podcast Answers, the show where we help, where I help you start and grow your

podcast, answering any podcasting questions along the way. That's right. Today is no different.

I am a little bit discombobbled today. I'm trying a few different things. I'm going live

on Instagram, which is kind of new for me.

Doing this with a beta version,

not even beta, alpha version of Ecamm Live that supports both wide and tall format.

It's a whole new thing.

It's a new process for me.

So if you caught the beginning of this video

and it wasn't exactly professional, that's why it's because I have to start

the whole Instagram live thing and it it's just interesting to do

because I've never I've not done that in a while.

So that's that's something that's going to be new.

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us live, you can leave us a voicemail because later it'll let you leave a voicemail. But

right now, right now that comes to the studio, you can join us live. You can have a lot of

fun with us because we are live. We are going to be talking today about Apple podcasts.

That's right.

We're talking about something new that Apple podcast has done to allow us to create chapters

and links.

And that's something that's a little bit new for at least for Apple podcast.

You could before do Apple podcast, you could do chapters if you I believe you could do

chapters if you could.

No, no, no, you could not.

Maybe if you added in the RSS or in the MP3 tag, yes, you could.

But now they're allowing you to do it.

Actually, no, they're not.

This is all new, all new.

Forgive me, there's all sorts of apps do different things with the chapters.

And so Apple podcast is now going to allow you to to do podcast chapters in their chapters.

So it's chapters isn't anything that's really new.

We've had it for a while.

you could put them in your MP3 file.

And what would happen is it would show up and you can.

Some people may think of it as skipping your content.

People sometimes you may think, hey, I don't want chapters because

it's going to allow people to skip my content and skip

what I'm actually wanting them to hear.

But if you think about it, that's yes, it's going to allow them to skip.

It's going to allow them to skip. But.

At what point, like if it's something specific content,

And especially if you're gonna be doing a long podcast,

a long format where you're talking about

lots of different topics or subjects or whatever,

if people are only interested in topic Y,

then why make them listen through X, Y, and Z?

Let them skip to that point.

And so what I've done, and again,

the thing about that is they can skip around

and then maybe they're gonna skip my ads that are in there.

Well, yes, and they may do that anyways

because they can skip, they can push the 30 second forward

thing and skip your ads really easily.

So what I do to kinda combat that is I just put my ad

right at the beginning of my chapter,

so if they're gonna be listening to that chapter,

they're gonna at least hear that starting out.

Now, again, how you can provide chapters.

So the cool thing about the way that Apple Podcast

is implementing this is kind of the same way

that they did with transcripts.

So if you don't know,

transcripts have been around for a while.

The podcast 2.0 podcasting 2.0 has allowed you to create transcripts and chapters.

And this is nothing really new and even even links to it.

This is nothing really new.

But what Apple is doing is kind of the same thing that they did with the Apple podcast

transcripts is if you don't provide one via the podcast tag in your RSS feed, then they're

going to generate one for you.

Now just like that, you can opt out of that.

So I'll talk about that in a little bit.

But if you decide you don't want them to automatically generate chapters for you, then you can you

can go ahead and opt out of that.

Now I'm interested to see how these chapters work.

You know, for me, I usually put chapters in at like an intro.

So if you're looking at this podcast, usually it's introduction kind of where I'm doing

the little beginning part where I'm talking about the live backstage, which you can go

to at podcast answers dot com slash backstage or our voicemail number five seven four five

zero one four nine four five, which at the moment takes you live into the studio if you

want to hear that live. But I want to join us live and be able to call into the studio.

But and then I have one for the main content and then kind of one as I'm wrapping up with

the last thing, you know. So it's not super helpful necessarily for a podcast like this,

but we're we're if there's a podcast where you're talking about lots of different things

and you chapter those out, that can be helpful.

So so so podcast Apple podcast, they're going to automatically generate

a podcast or a transcript.

They already do that for you.

They're going to generate a chapter for you. There you go.

And and they're going to allow you to stop that if you don't want.

But you can also put your own in there and you can do this

by a couple of different ways.

You can provide in the episode description

a time code like 00 colon 00 colon 00 and include.

you're going to include at least three chapters.

But if you do that, and presumably if you do a words

on that same line, it's going to be the chapter title.

I believe I could not find any good documentation in the Apple podcast

documentation about how to title your chapters.

But it did say, like, put your timestamp in there is 00 colon 00 colon 00.

And then you have to have one at the very beginning

and then include at least three chapters.

You can also include it in your RSS tag with a podcast colon chapters tag

and a lot of podcast hosts support this.

I know captivate the one that I love and the one that I suggest

allows you to go ahead and put put that in really easily,

right in their their interface.

And if you want to check out captivate, you can go to podcast answers

dot com slash captivate, and that will take you to the

the area where you can check out captivate.

But so you can either do that in your RSS.

Feed with the podcast chapters tag or in the metadata.

I do three tag, which is that's that's been around forever.

That doesn't allow you to do any links in there.

The nice thing about Apple podcasts, the way that they're doing it,

as well as the podcast answers podcast answers.

Wow. Podcasting two point O is doing it as you can.

is you can have links in there.

So if you go into the chapters

and you see want to link out to something, you can link out to it

and then easily be able to go in there and and

and and link out to something different.

Now, what the nice thing about doing it in your RSS tag,

as well as your description,

as you can go back in and edit it really easily.

If you're just doing chapters in your ID three tags,

You do that on your computer before you upload to your media host.

And so by doing that, if you needed to add a chapter

or remove a chapter or whatever, change any chapters,

let's say you spelled it wrong, you're going to need to edit that file again,

re upload it again, and then go from there.

The podcasting 2.0 way of doing it with a podcast colon

chapters tag is you're linking out to an external file

so you can edit that file at any point.

You can go back into your podcast host and say,

Actually, I want to add a chapter right here and you can have it put in there.

And it's super easy. And then the next time people listen to it,

there's going to be more chapters in there. So it's a really genius way of adding

chapters into your your podcast. So that's the way that I would suggest doing it.

If you can is do it in your your your media host. And again, if you're if you're using

something like Captivate, which is the web, the podcast host that I use, you can go ahead and

and really easily right in their interface, edit those those chapters.

Now, one of the things that that Apple podcast is saying

that you should be doing is you should be including at least three chapters to.

So that way that that it makes it worth it for the people.

And I don't know if that's a limit.

And again, I don't know.

Some of the stuff is kind of yet to be seen with Apple podcast.

So I don't know if you're able to go in and I think it probably pulls the file

again, updates the chapters that they have for you.

But they say limit also to no more than six per hour.

So we'll have at least three chapters, but no more than six per hour,

because I think that they're saying that that's too many for people to

to follow through.

They also say keep chapters no shorter than two minutes.

So you should at least have a two minute

chapter in there to make it worth it for people to go in and select that.

They say use title casing, so in other words, just like you'd put your caps

in in every beginning of every word, they say the best case

is using title casing. Now, again, this is just Apple's Apple's rule, Apple's style guide.

So they're saying do this and also spell out numbers. So if you're going to be saying something

about six, then you're going to want to put S.I.X. If you're saying six, seven, then you're

going to say S.I.X. as E.V.E. And yes, I did six, seven. So you're you're welcome. Now,

the other thing that is kind of cool is what they're saying is if they're auto generating

for you, you can download a text file with chapter titles and timestamps that they're

creating. So you can go ahead and use that. Download it so you have it. You can also then

use it for whatever repurpose if you want to put it into. Let's say you're using the

same audio for YouTube. You can go ahead and put that in your YouTube description and have

YouTube then use those same chapters that Apple podcast created. Now you can turn this

this off in the Apple podcast connect. And this is just for the automated ones. So you

can uncheck that and it's going to take out anything. It won't actually then create or

display any automated chapters that they're creating for you. Uh, so, so that way, I,

again, I don't know the quality of these chapters. They may do too many, too few, cause you don't

really have control of them. They just do them on their own. But from the captioning

transcripts that they do, they do a pretty decent job. And so, so for me, I think I would

leave them on. Most of the time, I'm automatically creating chapters anyways in my things in

my episodes, but not most.

So some people that aren't and so you can you can turn this off if you want for the

auto generated ones. And again, if I would actually skip a day, then it would be OK because

it would go ahead and actually create those for me. They say for troubleshooting, you

need to have the transcripts turned on, too. So if you've turned the automatic transcripts

off on your podcast or can't create a transcript for your podcast episode, then it will not

chapters for this. It's going to be doing that based on that transcript that it generates from

the audio. They also say episodes shorter than 10 minutes won't have chapters involved in them.

So that's good to know. Right now, I'm just over 12 minutes in this episode. But it if I was under

10 minutes and they're not going to automatically generate chapters now again, I'm assuming that if

you're producing your own episode and you're producing your own files, then it is going to

actually go ahead and honor that fact that you're putting those in there. But I think it's just

automatically generate chapters for podcast episodes

that are under 10 minutes.

They also say trailers will not have chapters

as well as private feeds too.

So if you have your own private feeds in there,

they're not gonna generate 'em.

It's only gonna be things that are gonna be in podcasts

connect in Apple for public distribution.

Now, the next thing that we're gonna be talking about

that they have produced is what's called timed links.

time links are essentially ways that it can pop up on screen and have a link for this.

Now, before you get to giddy and excited about this, there's some shortcomings for this.

So you can they'll automatically generate them for you, which again, you can turn off.

And I think that I would probably turn this off. Or you can do links in your chapters.

So I would say that they could.

The reason I say you may want to turn them off is it's actually only going to generate

links for things like Apple Books, Apple Music, Apple Maps, News, Apple News, Apple Podcasts,

Sports, Stocks, TV and Shazam.

So all of the suite of things that Apple Podcasts creates or Apple creates is what you're going

to be able to link to is you won't be able to link to other things in in there.

So you can provide the links yourself

by adding them into this description

just like you did with the chapters.

You're gonna put a timestamp and a link,

and again, it's gonna have to be links

to Apple products, Apple things.

They will not put those popping up automatically

in your Apple Podcast when you're using

any other link like that.

Or the other way to put them in

is to use the podcast colon chapters,

like you're creating chapters,

and then put a link to that service

in the link to the chapter.

So again, the Podcasting 2.0 standard

allows you to create a chapter

with a beginning time and a title,

but it also allows you to put a link in there

and that allows you to link out to anything you want.

So if you're listening to another app,

I like Castomatic.

I really like Castomatic.

I'm on iOS for my Apple,

and I really like Castomatic.

They're doing a lot of new things,

a lot of things with the Podcasting 2.0 community,

And I like those.

And those links actually show up.

You can link to anything in there.

Apple Podcasts, again, you're gonna do the same way.

You're gonna create a chapter,

but you're going to put a link in there.

But it's only gonna show up if you're linking out to,

again, Apple Books, Apple Music, Apple Maps,

Apple News, Apple Podcasts, Apple Sports,

Apple Stocks, Apple TV, and I'm gonna call it Apple Shazam,

'cause that's really what it is now.

But again, if you're noticing something here,

there's a trend. All of those products that I'm listing are Apple. They have the words

Apple at the beginning of them. They're just going to be the Apple products that you're

going to be able to link to. Now, automatically how this happens and they say, again, I'm

not super clear on this because this is, I haven't seen it in action yet, but what they're

saying is automatically when you discuss another podcast, they may detect that you just detected

another or talked about another podcast and link to that in your pop up.

I don't know that I would like that, just because the fact that I don't

I want to have a little bit more control over what I'm actually linking out to

and are all of these things.

So I think for my podcast, I'm probably going to turn the automatic detection

or automatic links off just because I don't really want them

to automatically detect something else.

And I have a few questions, too, because what happens if your podcast

has a wildly similar title to something else.

I mean, if you just go search something like

let's talk or talk about it or smart talk or anything like that,

you're going to get 300, if not 3000 podcasts back.

How is Apple podcast going to know exactly which one that you're talking about?

So this is maybe where they're saying may automatically detect it,

because I'm wondering if they can't say this is definitively

the podcast that you're talking about, then they may not link to it.

So that's one of the good things, one of the things that you need to

to remember when when talking about Apple, as far as the links in Apple.

Now, the links are going to appear in iOS 26.2.

And again, you can opt out of auto generated podcasts

just like you can with chapters and with transcriptions.

You can do that by going to Apple pie or podcast, connect

Podcasts that podcast connects that Apple's dot com.

And so that's it, guys.

This is I'm interested to see see how exactly they're going to implement this.

I'm excited to see what it actually means.

I want to see it in production before we get too, too far on this.

But that being said, if you have any questions,

you want me to answer or discuss on this podcast,

feel free to call 574-501-4945. And that will get you to our voicemail. And then also, if you can

send it in via a form podcastanswers.com/ask, I would love to be chatting with you about questions

that you have for your podcast. I want to help you start and grow your podcast. So if you have

any podcasting questions, again, podcastanswers.com/connect. That'll get you in to my

DMs, if you will, and allow you to ask a question as well as calling my voicemail line 574-501-4945.

And that will get you into the voicemail. Have a great week and keep podcasting.