Disclaimer: I am one of the creators of Snipd, a podcast app to highlight & take notes from podcasts.
Context
I get a lot of knowledge through listening to podcasts like Andrew Huberman, Lex Fridman, The Product Podcast, etc. I use the Snipd podcast app to highlight my favorite moments, take notes, and then export them with the transcript & summary to a Notion db, organized per episode.
I am now eager to try out Obsidian, and before getting started wanted to ask how others are organizing their podcast knowledge in Obsidian.
My plan
One page per episode, with episode title as the filename, containing:
meta-data of the episode (show notes, publish date, url, guest names, image etc.)
every highlight I have created for that episode, including:
my personal notes (including custom tags & backlinks)
summary
transcript
the start & end timestamp of the highlight in the podcast
URL to the highlighted podcast moment
Backlinks
the podcast show (e.g. [[Lex Fridman Podcast]])
host-name (e.g. [[Lex Fridman]])
guest names (e.g. [[Joscha Bach]])
Tags: #podcasts
Optionally, one page per podcast show (e.g. Lex Fridman Podcast) if I have thoughts/notes which do not directly relate to an episode.
I have no idea really about how to do this (don’t use podcasts too much), so just a suggestion: it’s nice to use dataview fields for metadata (key:: value pairs), because then you can have all kinds of useful dataview queries – e.g., you can list all the shows on a certain date, hosted by a certain person, etc.
(The alternative is to put the metadata in the YAML, but that doesn’t support links.)
Otherwise, this looks really good to me!
I follow a very similar structure to the one you present — perhaps with the minor difference that podcast episodes are linked (or transcluded) as sources from standalone notes containing the main ideas. This seems to work best as the same topic might be touched on from different sources (a guest happens to be the host of his own podcast).
I too also get a lot of value from listening to podcasts (similar tastes, by the look of it!). However I painfully do most of the capturing by hand, or dictating to a speech recognition software like Otter. Snipd looks like a game-changer for extracting transcriptions (particularly for those 2 hour Lex Fridman episodes!). Thanks for sharing!
This might be a tangential question, so apologies for hijacking the topic: There seems to be quite a bit of heavy lifting involved on a server to process the audio. Computing doesn’t come free,so what’s the business model for Snipd?
I just ran across this today and thought I’d share. It’s not so much about organizing knowledge from podcasts, but I found this interesting nonetheless. This YouTuber outlines a process for capturing notes while listening to podcasts using Shortcuts, Castro, and Drafts. I haven’t tried this yet myself since I currently use Overcast.
Thx @atiz for the dataview fields suggestion. I will look into this.
@jesteve: that’s great to hear and I see your point with linking the episodes to standalone concepts.
So do I understand that correctly, that in my case above, you would:
Have a standalone page for the various concepts. For example one could be “skill learning”.
On that concept page you would put the following backlink: [[How to Learn Skills Faster - Episode 20]]
Or do you do it the other way around? I.e. put the backlink [[skill learning]] on the episode page?
W.r.t. your tangential question: We haven’t defined this yet in detail. But in the end, it will most probably look very similar to how other podcast apps are handling this.
What I do is I copy the transcript into my Vault, give the episode its own note, than break up the episode by topics, as if it were a book with different chapters. An example of what this looks like is this github project I stumbled upon from /u/FenryrMKIII on Github.
So each episode of a podcast that I found really engaging (e.g. I felt the urge to listen to a second time) I do the above. Then when I find myself wanting to link to an idea or section within the podcast, I will extract the current section out, turning it into its own note. Than in the original transcript I will leave an embed of the new note.
I don’t really do any of the metadata stuff other people do besides linking the transcript to a note I have for the podcast overall and adding a #Podcast tag to the note.
@lizardmenfromspace This sounds interesting!
In a way, it is similar to what I am doing. Except that I do the “breaking up into topics” part while listening and then only keep the highlighted parts.
If I may ask, which service are you using to transcribe the podcasts?
I personally like cross-linking —and obsidian makes this exceedingly easy— so it’d be a mixture of both. However the emphasis would be as you describe: linking the episodes from the concept (as sources, alongside with any other material).
I would like to have blocks for each idea. I don’t know if your AI can extract each idea, not only the transcription and summary.
I say this because in Obsidian, and in general in PKM and Zettelkasten, most of the people prefer to link and transcript atomic notes (one idea per note).
This would be great for a quick process of the Snips.
Running List of Podcasts I like that takes the form of below format
Or podcast that has a transcript broken up (e.g. Mindscape, Conversations with Tyler)
Date - Name of Series
Title: title of the specific podcast
Date: date the podcast was published
Publisher Description: description accompanying the podcast
Idea Index
Interesting Idea 1
Interesting Idea 2
Interesting Idea 3
Takeaway: main takeaway of the podcast
Link: link to podcast
The most important podcasts that I also have a transcript for I will break up into sections based on the idea within the notes itself. Then link to them at the top of the page using the same idea index. I will then link to the sections in other notes if they are relevant or they spark an idea that I want to add to a previous note.
I either get a summary of the podcast, or i use otter.ai to transcribe a mp3 of the podcast and process it as an article instead. Audio format is a big pain for me.
How are you organizing it?
and I see your point with linking the episodes to standalone concepts.