A command that extracts a podcast episode’s details, transcript, and summary into an Obsidian note. It accepts Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or direct RSS feed links; RSS is the standard web feed used to publish podcast episodes.

Use it to save episode metadata, transcripts, and summaries from supported podcast links for later search and reference.

It brings audio information into searchable notes instead of requiring you to replay an episode to find a detail. Spotify-exclusive episodes without a public RSS feed may not work.

podcast — Command for Claude Code by eugeniughelbur

About the project

obsidian-second-brain turns an Obsidian vault into persistent, searchable memory for Claude Code and other command-line coding agents, storing knowledge as linked Markdown notes. It is for developers, founders, writers, and researchers who want agents to retain project context across sessions. Its catalogue entries provide commands, hooks, a plugin, a skill, and instructions for capturing, finding, and maintaining that memory.

eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain · 4,376 stars · on GitHub · eugeniughelbur.github.io

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install obsidian-second-brain, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 47 commands, 3 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain/podcast/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain/podcast)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain/podcast"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain/podcast/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain/podcast"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain/podcast.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 21 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.

When invoked 1,438 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00021	$0.01438
Opus 5	$0.00010	$0.00719
Sonnet 5	$0.00004	$0.00288
Haiku 4.5	$0.00002	$0.00144

Measured 10d ago against content hash 0040e5f08e29, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

podcast scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/podcast.md · 51 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 51 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Use the obsidian-second-brain skill. Execute /podcast [url]:

Resolve the podcast URL from the user's argument. Accept any of:
- Apple Podcasts episode URL (https://podcasts.apple.com/.../id<show>?i=<episode>)
- Spotify episode URL (https://open.spotify.com/episode/<id>) - Spotify's own audio is DRM-locked, so the script bridges it to the show's public RSS feed: it reads the episode title from Spotify's key-free oEmbed endpoint, finds that episode in Apple's index to get the feed URL, then pulls the episode from the open feed by title. Works for any show that also publishes an open feed (most do); fails clearly for Spotify-exclusive shows with no public RSS.
- Direct RSS feed URL (uses the latest episode unless ?episode=<guid> selector is appended)
- Direct RSS feed URL with ?episode=<guid-fragment-or-link-fragment> selector
If no input given, ask: "Which podcast episode? Paste the Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS feed URL."
Run the script from the skill root (its absolute path was given at session start as Skill root; substitute it for SKILL_ROOT):
```
uv run --directory "SKILL_ROOT" -m scripts.research.podcast_extract "<url>"
```
The script:
- Resolves Apple Podcasts URLs to RSS via the free iTunes Lookup API (no key needed).
- Parses the RSS feed, extracts episode metadata (title, show, host, published, duration, audio URL, show notes).
- Tries to obtain a transcript in this order:
  1. <podcast:transcript> tag in the RSS feed (free, fast, high fidelity).
  2. Groq-hosted Whisper, only if GROQ_API_KEY is set (free tier). Downloads audio, re-encodes it to 32kbps mono so episodes up to ~4.5h fit in Groq's 25MB per-request cap (longer episodes are split into chunks with overlap and stitched). No cost on the free tier, but the free tier also caps audio at 7,200 seconds per hour (as of 2026-08, console.groq.com): an episode longer than about 2h gets a 429 and falls through to the next step, and a second long episode within the same hour does too. Needs ffmpeg and ffprobe on PATH.
  3. Whisper API, only if OPENAI_API_KEY is set. Downloads audio (<=25 MB OpenAI per-file limit), transcribes via whisper-1. Approximate cost: $0.006/min.
  4. Show-notes-only fallback. If no transcript path works, summarizes from RSS show notes alone. Quality drops; Notable Quotes will be empty.
- Sends transcript-or-shownotes for AI-first summarization: Gemini when GEMINI_API_KEY is set (free tier, 1M context), otherwise Grok. The transcript is capped at PODCAST_TX_LIMIT characters (default 480,000, about 120k tokens) with a truncation note if the episode is longer; on the Grok path that cap is a real cost, roughly $0.36 per 3h episode at grok-4 rates, so lower it there if that matters.
- Returns: TL;DR, Key Points, Notable Quotes, Themes & Topics, Guests & People Mentioned, Worth Following Up On.
Show the script output verbatim to the user.
Default save behavior: saves automatically. AI-first note written to Research/Podcasts/YYYY-MM-DD - <episode-title-slug>.md (hyphen separator, matches the existing /youtube and /research filename pattern). Frontmatter includes show, host, episode-title, episode-url, feed-url, guid, published, duration, transcript-source (one of rss-transcript-tag / groq-whisper-api / whisper-api / show-notes), and tags.
Plain English triggers: "summarize this podcast", "what's in this episode", "transcribe this podcast", or just pasting an Apple Podcasts URL with a question about content.
If no transcript path works and the show notes are empty or too short, the script fails with a clear message (exit code 1). Surface it. Suggest the user either picks a podcast that publishes transcripts, or sets GROQ_API_KEY (free-tier Groq Whisper) or OPENAI_API_KEY (paid Whisper API) for audio transcription.
If the user asks to research someone or something mentioned in the "Worth Following Up On" or "Guests & People Mentioned" section, route that to /research [topic] (or /obsidian-person if it's a vault-worthy contact).

Read the full file on GitHub · 51 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

10d ago First seen · 51 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 0040e5f08e29

Subscribe to this mod's changes

podcast is a command published in the GitHub repository eugeniughelbur/obsidian-second-brain (4,376 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 1,438 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Claude Code Research Writing and docs ai-agents anthropic claude obsidian second-brain

podcast

Getting it into your agent

Wrote this? Show the measurements

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade A, and why

Nothing flagged

How it starts

What this file has done since we first saw it

Other commands, from other repositories

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daily-journal

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