Matter Podcasts Integration

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Matter continues to add features that make a subscription to the service even more valuable. The latest is an enhancement to their recent podcast support. Matter will not intelligently (some might say artificially) break podcasts down into chapters. This is something that used to be done organically with podcasts, but seems to have fallen by the wayside as podcasters potentially worried about people skipping the now ubiquitous ads. It's nice to have this capability back. Though it may be a comment on our go-go lifestyles, it's really handy to be able to skip to the parts of a podcast you are most interested in. This is especially useful on the podcasts that are discussions of different subjects. The above image is how it looks for a show like The Holy Post.

The new feature doesn't exactly fit a workflow of listening to a podcast when you are, say, cooking or driving. When you are listening for reference material, though, this feature and the ability of Matter to transcribe podcasts, then use built-in tools like the highlighter + sync with Obsidian, make for a powerful workflow.

I've seen a lot of sentiment recently about overcomplicated workflows, but there are some, like the above, that truly enable superpowers when it comes to research and documentation or even curation. Linking together ideas is one of the things that Obsidian advertises, for instance, and Matter's new feature is just the type of tool that makes that process a lot easier.

A side note: The FAQs for Matter's new podcast feature are contained in a tweet (or whatever you call posts on X). What happened to actual product documentation? It's not uncommon these days for software to gain features with little to no documentation that actually explains how to use them.