Most of the week went into one thing: getting ads into episodes without wrecking the listening experience. Ads are now stitched in when someone presses play, so the audio file you produced stays exactly as you made it. Alongside that, episodes picked up proper chapter titles, and a scheduling bug that quietly swallowed every midnight publish got tracked down and fixed.
New features
Dynamic ad insertion
Podcast settings has a new Monetization section. Turn on dynamic ad insertion for a show and you choose whether it carries a pre-roll, a post-roll, and how many mid-rolls to allow. Auto picks a mid-roll count based on episode length, or you can pin it to one, two, or three. Nothing is baked into the audio file. Ads are assembled at listen time, which means a sponsor can change and your back catalogue updates with it.
The reads themselves sound like part of the show. A host delivers them in their own voice, and there is no "and now, a message from our sponsor" hand-off wrapped around them. Sponsor segments land in the first half of the episode where people are still listening.
Per-episode ad overrides
Any single episode can opt out of the show defaults from its Content and SEO tab. Set it to ads on or ads off regardless of what the show says, and pick where the pre-roll goes: right at the episode start, or after your intro music so the show still opens with its own identity. Changes take effect the next time the episode is published.
Chapters with real titles
Episode chapters used to read "Part 1", "Part 2", "Part 3". They now use the actual section titles from the script, so the chapter list in a player tells you what each part covers. Episodes that go out with ads also get a transcript built from the script rather than a re-transcription of the assembled audio, so the transcript stays clean and the sponsor read does not show up in it.
Returning guests get recognised
If someone has been on the show before, the interview warm-up and the spoken opener now say so. Guests do not get greeted like a stranger on their third appearance.
Improvements
Scripted episodes now go through the modular blueprint pipeline. Each part of the episode is planned separately before anything is written, which keeps long episodes from drifting off topic halfway through and makes reruns of a failed step cheaper.
Episode planning and script generation moved to Claude Opus 5. While auditing the call sites, we found several places where the model was being billed at the wrong rate, so cost reporting is now accurate too. The generation settings screen also stopped claiming "extended thinking" on models that were not actually running it.
The player got a colour pass. Episodes with bright cover art were having their gradient washed toward gray, so the aura behind the player now pulls real colour from the artwork.
Interview post-call recovery is harder to knock over. If a session ends badly, recovery now walks through what it can prove happened rather than guessing, and it refuses to proceed when the recording's origin is unclear instead of producing something wrong.
Bug fixes
Fixed guest interview recordings being rejected and lost. A database constraint on the video file path was turning away valid uploads, and the recordings that were already dropped have been recovered.
Fixed a male host speaking in a female voice on interview episodes. The selected host's voice is now used for the spoken parts of the session.
Fixed episodes scheduled for midnight never publishing. The scheduler was reading midnight back as hour 24, which never matched an hour of the day, so those shows sat in the queue indefinitely.
Fixed the Content and SEO tab returning a server error on some episodes.
Fixed deletes failing on episodes, content sources, and interview sessions. Related records were holding foreign key references that blocked the delete instead of clearing themselves.
Fixed ad-segmented episodes silently dropping custom intro and outro jingles. Shows with their own bumpers keep them when ads are stitched in.