So this is our last AVG Devroom talk of the day, it's another podcasting one, I'm using AI to do
that by guessing it's, well, I find out how you can use AI, thank you very much.
Hello everyone, today I'm going to talk to you about a new project which is called Pod
Libre and it's a podcast audio editing software for the AI age.
This is the mascot for Pod Libre and we have some stickers so feel free to come and get
some after the presentation.
So let me introduce myself, I'm Benjamin, I love podcast, I love free an open source software,
I work at Lina Goha, developing truly open source AI solution and I emphasize on truly open
source.
I'm also the founder of Adorece which is a company that develops open source solution
for podcasters, one of them is CasterPod which is an open source podcas hosting platform
and I'm also a photographer for Wikipedia which does nice picture for Wikipedia.
So first let's talk about who is a developer in the room, okay that's over 100% and
who is a podcaster, okay like 25, who wants to be a podcaster, okay and who is listening
to podcasters or like 100% okay.
So now I'm talking to the person who are already podcasting what software do you use, what
is your workflow, like the main editing software.
Oper, vapor audacity.
Logic okay, that's it.
No one is using outer, okay, like the rhythm, okay so let's start with a definition
what is put lib or per lib array of its it's come from podcasts and from lib which
is free as in free speech. So it's either French or Spanish. I'm taking just two
examples that I wish we'll see in the dictionary in a few years. I switch to
per lib because I want it full control over my podcast workflow without sending my
audio to the cloud or the per lib approach means owning your entire
projection chain from recording to RSS feed. Because of course we all agree
here that podcasting is linked to RSS. If there is no RSS feed then it's not a
podcast. If it's on YouTube it's probably not a podcast. So I'm going to tell
you my story. Bonnie just before me said that everything about recording a
podcasting is like a religion. And I totally agree with her. In fact I
couldn't agree more. So welcome to my church. Back six years ago we wanted a
solution to host our podcast and to host the podcast for our customers, our
clients. And we couldn't find any and more of her we wanted one which was
connected to the Fediverse and that was we could find even less. So we started
CastoPod as a side project. We're deeply grateful for the community that
we've built like over 1.7 million hours of content. So people are trusting us
with their content. Most of them are self hosting which is what we wanted in
the first place. So that's really great. And it's translated in over 30 languages.
Some of them we are like the only podcast platform having these languages like
Roton. In France there's no other platform using that language and this is why
we love open source because if you want something you can have it. So we're
our podcasters too. So this is my church. Over the years I started using logic
then other because it's open source and because it's non-destructive then I
switch to audacity because it's easier faster and it's almost non-destructive
now not 100% but almost and with the new version you can use it with pipe
wires. So yeah it makes sense but we are a big advocate for transcriptions,
for obvious accessibility and discoverability issues. So we need to make transcriptions
and I developed over the years some patent scripts to do that and many scripts.
So publishing an episode has become very cumbersome and when talking to other
podcasters we will realize that we are not the only ones with these issues. So this
is why we decided to start public labor. One other thing is that the software we are
using so we per our audacity to read them logic. They are done for musicians and
there are many many things that we don't need and many things that we need that's
aren't there. So the workflow is not very appropriate for podcasting. So this is an
example. So this is my podcast the latest episode yes. So as I said and as Bonnie said
this is my religion maybe yours is totally different and this is why I'm talking to you
now because at some point we need some feedback because there is no way that we have
all the good answers just with a bunch of us. So we really need your feedback if there is
one thing that should come out this stock is feedback from you. So here you can see there are
some speakers so one microphone per speaker you can see that when someone is not talking it's totally
blank it's muted. Here there are chapters you can see yeah next weekend it's first them here
the Trump is the best advocate for open source software here is the music and doing that
that's that's pretty simple it's very easy they are like four tracks plus the chapters
that should take 10 minutes and I really do think that's doing this editing this should
no more than 10 minutes but the truth is it takes hours because you need to normalize the level
and to compress the audio and maybe here this was our intern he's 14 so he spoke too far away
from the microphone so the ratio signal noise was not good enough so we have to level up the sound
so there was too much noise so we had to remove noise but all these should be almost automatic
it should be most complicated part you have to do which should be checking a checkbox because
these are the thing that we do every week this is the transcription edition if you do we do
automatic the transcription but you have to correct it and there is no software that allows you to
correct that in a way that you feel your in 2026 and more of the transcription is done afterwards
but I needed before editing because the transcription could be very useful for editing
so this is a benchmark that we did over a year ago with many many tools open source and non-open source
I'll publish the the full presentation afterwards and none of them answers our needs
our needs so we need transcript driven editing because we want to be able to use the
transcription to edit and to know which one should be taken out noise reduction one metadata
place for everything because there are many metadata the title the show notes the transcription
the chapters and right now you have to put them like maybe there are some ID three tags within the
MP3 file and in the end it takes much time for no ID value chapter management etc
so we asked you is there anyone here who answered this poll in the room no you don't remember so we asked
that's on the the fetivers on mastodone and we asked would it make sense so it was over a year ago
we did make sense to develop a tool for podcast edition and yeah we we got like 45 plus 36
percent we said yeah so put libre is a podcast editor built by podcaster for podcasters and open source
so the key principles we want something that's cross platform because even though I'm using
linux and I think everyone should one step at a time it should also be able to run on macOS
and windows privacy focus because we don't want to sense our data to any big tech we need a
plugin based architecture because I know that my workflow is not yours and even my workflow
can evolve and change depending on which podcast if I'm hosting two podcasts they probably
don't want to have the same workflow of course it's open source and to be able to run offline
I don't want an application that's used APIs for everything maybe there's one plugin that we
have an API and run on the cloud but I want it to be able to run offline so this is the like the
basic workflow that we designed so you create a podcast then an episode your import your files
maybe later but that's not our priority your record from the application and then you would
like normalize audio reduce noise compress then transcripts and you'd be able to correct the
transcription and go back and then serve the music something that's really miss on all
audio editing software is the ability to have a music which length can adapt to the lens of my
introduction so like we've beginning a loop and ending and I would just want to be able to
drag and drop and say use the loop as many times as possible so that's the intro music last
as long as my introduction my spoken introduction then you did the chapters the metadata and
you export you publish to whichever hosting system you want to so this is something that
it would look like this is a mockup it doesn't exist yet we have some stuff running but I want
to be showing them to you today because we a little bit behind schedule and this is what we
started working on so we are using Python because I said before I developed many scripts with Python
because we need transcription we need many things that are working there where you can p-y cute
so that it can run on any platform we spur a set it and noise redirect by dub and plugin architecture
so we've a little more detail this is what it looks like I published that so that you can have a
look at it and give us feedback of course because as I said and I'm repeating myself we need your feedback
so we built the very first break we have a work in progress we have plugins we have transcription
we started editing the audio so we have the core architecture the plugin system is functional
we also got a grant from an alnets to make sure that this is sustainable and that's will we
go to the end my company address of course is standing it but what this means it's things will break
we will the UI will change your feedback shapes everything repeating again and now it's probably the
best time to get involved because the more the mayor year but also the better ideas we can get
we know that it won't be that easy there are many many things to do
the platform compatibility GPU acceleration we don't even know if we want to do something like that on
macOS with the new silicon systems managing compatibility with Python because plugins is the key
and you know that it's very easy to make a mess with plugins and with stability because I'm using
audacity I'm using like the latest version 3.7 and it's not stable and I say a lot of bad
words when I'm editing right now I haven't tried the version 4 which is not finished yet you can
do chapter is it's missing a lot of features but we need something that's stable and we want to
spend like 10 minutes maybe half an hour on it not hours because it keeps on crashing
so if you want to join us if you want to give us your feedback it can be technical it can be
we're talking of features and environments things that we haven't sort of there's a website which
is put lib.org there's a community website which is community.podlib.org and the source code is on
codeberg because we don't like GitHub because we don't like Microsoft.
Thank you.
Thank you very much questions if we can write there's one right up at the back we have to use
the microphones that people online can hear so thank you for everything I'm an enthusiast
customer the user in self-hosting and my question is exactly if in your roadmap there is any
seamless integration to start from the recording to the publishing on one very best platform which
may be cast upon the world. Yeah of course we in the very first version we plan to integrate
with cast-op-odd so that's you can publish directly from pod lib to cast-op-odd without even opening
Firefox we also plan to have a local publishing because I think that a podcast in the end it's just
MP3 files and analysis text file so we should be able to publish to a static website so this is one
other if you have a static website also we want it to we want to the the app to be able to
upload it to an FTP SFTP server so that's win one click it's online and you don't even need
PHP on your server one thing that we also integrate and there's a talk later this afternoon
it's called Fur Camp it's also a project granted by an alnet and it's a software that
publishes static website for audio so and the thing is we're doing a plugin architecture so
that's when you create a workflow you select the plugins that you want and in the end if you want
to publish to cast-op-odd you select the cast-op-odd plugin and you say this is where I want to publish
and if you do another podcast on another platform you duplicate this workflow and you just
change the publishing plugin at the end put to publish it to I don't know Spotify for podcasts
or YouTube podcast that's your decision and I have questions about the workflow you showed and about
the software so I'm working in a okay I mean a nonprofit radio in Britain in France and we are
looking for software who are more easier than a rapper so I'm very interested about the
little although I'm also a sound engineer and I've seen a I have questions about some of the
technical aspects and especially your work for you mentioned compressing audio before editing
in and something like that I just want to be sure if you in the software you if it will be as flexible
as a rapper which also a rapper can not only do music but a very lot of stuff I've done mixing
for short films and other stuff so maybe we can also meet later
after I'm not a big fan of reaper because it's not open source and everyone is using it because
it's free if you choose not to pay for it so I don't like this business model either you pay for it
or you don't and many podcasters in France are using it because you can cheat and get it for free
without but and it's not open source and it runs on Linux but with some tricks the thing is
to answer your question the workflow that I showed is an example it's my church and if you don't
a few months ago I didn't even compress sound because I like sound like writer of the microphone
I take very good care of the environment and the microphone so that's I don't have to change anything
and some listeners say you have to compress because in the car we can't hear and so I change my mind
and I change my workflow there is not one workflow even for a single person so of course you have to
be able to adapt so very nice idea very nice initiative I think so thank you for that I have
two questions but I'm not sure if I'm allowed the first one is about the PyTorch dependency that you mentioned
that typically that's used for training not for inference and one because I know from experience
dealing with packaging Python stuff course platform that becomes very hard to manage is that something
that you are going to maybe require at runtime or only for like building or so yeah this is a
copy paste form everything that we've been working on the past few years with my colleagues and I
there's one thing that we not we don't know for sure maybe at some points we will build several
versions so that you can choose maybe you don't care about transcription and you don't want this
at all and you want something like a minimal install very small so that you can run on the very
old laptop and that's probably what we're going to do if you want to keep it simple to provide
several versions and we'll build many of them the thing is it has to we don't want too many of them
because otherwise you won't be able to choose which one you want if I'm allowed the second question
that's good the other question would be regarding because I saw their deep filter net that I had
some experiments done with and there is a way to package everything it's something that I'm working
together with a friend of mine to package everything into an audio plugin so you don't have to
sell up any training don't have to sell up dependencies it just ends up with a single plugin binary
basically would you consider maybe picking out all the pytorch all the other dependencies if you
can just install one single plugin that does for example the like vocal isolation if it does it for you
do you still need all these other AI tools if you have plugins that can do the real time processing
of the audio we want to put as much as possible into the plugins we are I'm currently using whisper
but whisper is not the the only transcription engine in town there is not a skewty the even
meta release the like months or two ago trend models for a 1000 languages we've translation so
we want to put as few as less possible in the core app of course unfortunately we've run out of time
and we keep very strict time at fostered so thank you very much great to all great questions
and great AVT creation everyone as our first