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Smart Midroll Injection Tool

Jan 28, 2026

Injecting ads into a podcast at exact timestamps sounds easy until your sponsor read lands mid-sentence. This tool finds natural break points using word-level timestamps and semantic scoring, then stitches in your rolls cleanly. It also transcribes episodes and generates show notes - and that transcription is what powers the midroll engine.

Why midroll?

My Gnothi Series creates ongoing educational series and podcasts: describe a subject, and it researches, writes, and narrates episodes on a schedule.

This post explains the midroll injection engine I built for podcast production: placing sponsor reads, intros, and outros at natural breaks in an episode.

How midroll injection works

The engine takes episode audio and recorded rolls, then places the rolls automatically:

Smart break-point detection

This is what makes it not suck. If you say "every 20 minutes," it doesn't blindly cut at 20:00. It finds 20:00 plus or minus ~5 minutes, looking for the best break point based on sentence boundaries and context shifts. The transcription gives us word-level timestamps, and a semantic scoring model identifies where you've actually finished a thought. So your sponsor read doesn't land in the middle of "and that's why transformers use atten--THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY--tion mechanisms."

Context replay

After a mid-roll, the tool replays a few seconds of audio from before the break. So listeners get re-oriented. You know that feeling when an ad ends and you've completely lost the thread? This fixes that.

Stale tracking

Change your rolls and every affected episode gets flagged as "stale." Re-process them in bulk. Swap out a sponsor, re-roll everything, done.

Transcription and show notes

The tool also transcribes your episode (via faster-whisper), then an LLM generates a title, teaser, and full description from the transcript. Paste those straight into your podcast host or website. No more staring at a blank description field for 20 minutes after you just spent an hour recording.

The transcription also feeds the midroll engine - word-level timestamps are what make the smart break-point detection possible.

Where this fits

The engine handles one part of podcast production. Gnothi Series handles the ongoing show: researching, writing, and narrating episodes about the subject you choose.

Create your own learning podcast

Choose a subject and a schedule. Gnothi researches, writes, and narrates an ongoing series you can follow in your podcast app.

Explore Gnothi Series