Adding Chapters to Your Podcast Using Forecast
A quick tutorial about how to enhance the experience for your listeners using the free Forecast app from Marco Arment
🖥 👉 Watch my full screencast tutorial for Forecast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQKr1sF54BU
How Does It Work?
After downloading and opening Forecast, you’ll need an audio file to import into the app. I bounce out a .wav version of my episodes, but MP3s will work too. You can either click the Import Audio button in the top left and find your file in the Finder, or drag and drop your file into the Import Button area of the app.
As soon as you import that audio file, Forecast will start encoding it as an MP3. This is a great feature and a huge time saver, because you can add the other information while the file is being encoded.
You’ll have the option to add your podcast title, episode title, and the summary of the episode as ID3 tags in the audio file.
Adding Chapters with Markers
Forecast makes it easy to add podcast chapters with time-stamps, but if you use an audio editor that supports markers, you can drop a marker at the starting point of each chapter. When you export the audio file and add it to Forecast, those marker start times and titles will show up and you’ll have the option to add links/URLs and images for each chapter as well.
If you’d like to try including chapters in your podcast, start by thinking of the different sections of your show (or questions if you’re doing an interview show) as chapters. Then while you’re recording or editing, drop markers at the time you’d like to use for the start of the chapter.
I recommend creating chapters for the intro, any sponsors, the main topics or ideas of the episode, or whatever else you want to call out or feature within the episode.
When you’re done editing your episode and you export your audio file and import it into Forecast, all your markers should show up as chapters with timestamps. You can then add custom images and URLs for each chapter if you’d like.
You should end up with something that looks like this (in the iOS Overcast app):
Silence Warnings
Forecast will give you a list of long silences that might be unintentional, which will help you spot mistakes (like leaving 30 minutes of silence at the end of an episode, which is something that I’ve done on a few occasions).
Sponsor Airchecks
Forecast also gives you the option to export the audio for your sponsor read chapters (called “airchecks”) so your sponsors can hear how you talked about their product or service to your listeners.
Wrapping Up
I’ve been using Forecast to tag and add chapters to Dribbble’s Overtime podcast and the 3 Point Perspective podcast, and I’ve been really pleased with the results. It’s a nice way to provide the listeners with a table of contents for the episode along with links and pictures and it doesn’t require a lot of extra work.
Big thanks to Marco for creating and sharing a useful tool for podcasters.
You can download Forecast here.
