Podcast Chapters, Annotations, and Points of Interests with the Backtracks Player

The Backtracks Player™ now has a new ability to have embedded annotations and chapters directly in the player. The feature can be used as chapters, annotations, timelines, or points of interests that enable the listener or user of the player to navigate to specific points in time of the audio with a click or tap while having context about that portion of audio. This Backtracks feature even comes with the ability to have links and images time synchronized with the chapter (i.e. audio/visual podcast storytelling).

Uses of audio and podcast chapters

• Organization and to direct the user to particular points in time
• Commentary
• Visuals, links, and more timed to your audio

How to use chapters in the Backtracks Player™

• First, you can use the Backtracks chapters feature on any podcast free of charge
• If you want to embed chapters directly in your audio you can do that as well for free with the Backtracks Chapter Editor and you can integrate those exact same chapters with the Backtracks player (we’ll e-mail you everything you need from the Backtracks Chapter Editor)
• Follow the instructions here for advanced use cases

Examples of chapters in the Backtracks Player™

Here are examples of the player with chapters:

Here’s an example of the integrated chapter timeline as well:

Here is a short example of how to setup a chapter timeline with a Backtracks player that’s on the page:

<script>
    var backtracksChapters = [
     {
        "id":"abc123",
        "title":"Title of Chapter",
        "body":"This can be things like backtracks.fm",
        "start":2
     },
     {
        "id":"set-to-anything-unique",
        "title":"Another Title",
        "body":"This is \"Another Example\"",
        "start":35,
        "end":42
     }
    ];
    (function addChapters() {
      var targetElements = document.getElementsByClassName('backtracks-player');
      for (var i = 0; i < targetElements.length; i++) {
        item = targetElements[i];
        item.dataset.btChapters = JSON.stringify(backtracksChapters);
      }
    })();

(function(p,l,a,y,s){if(p[a])return
if(p[y])return p[y]();s=l.createElement('script')
l.head.appendChild((s.async=p[a]=true,
s.src='https://player.backtracks.fm/embedder.js',
s))}(window,document,'__btL','__btR'));
</script>

This is Tom Podett, we’ll leave the audio on for you.