The Start of a New Chapter

The Start of a New Chapter

Steno.fm now supports chapter markers! Now it’s even easier to find your place and jump right to your favorite moment in episodes that support chapters! And we’re not content with only supporting a single format. We’re handling all the major types and also a couple of obscure ones!

MP3 Chapters

You’ve likely run into these before. These are chapter markers encoded into the ID3 tags of the MP3 file. These can be generated by tools like Marco Arment’s Forecast, the Podcast Chapters Mac app, or Backtrack’s Podcast Chapter Editor.

AAC Chapters

These are also known as Enhanced podcasts, which Wikipedia tells me were first used in 2006. AAC chapters were the only way to get chapter markers in Apple’s first-party apps until Apple Podcasts added support for MP3 chapters in fall 2018.

Podcasting 2.0 Chapters

Getting away from the legacy of encoding chapters into the audio file, the folks involved in the podcast namespace project have adopted the new <podcast:chapters> tag.

Podlove Simple Chapters

This is an older in-feed chapter format. It's the only prescribed method to get chapters into Spotify according to their Podcast Delivery Specification. I had trouble tracking down a show that used these, and even then I didn't see any chapter navigation in my Spotify.

YouTube-style chapters

If none of the above options work for you, Steno.fm had added support for one wildcard option: adding timestamps to your show notes! Taking a page from YouTube’s automatic chapters feature, there must be at least 3 timestamps and titles in your list, and the first timestamp must be marked as 0:00.

And there you have it. No matter what way you include chapters in your podcast, we’re making sure listeners can take advantage of it in Steno.fm.