Podcast Chapter Checker

Usually, but not always, and the page tells you which case you are in. The three rulebooks agree on two things: the first chapter starts at 00:00 and there are at least three of them. They disagree on spacing, where the minimum is 10 seconds on YouTube, 30 seconds on Spotify and 2 minutes on Apple, and on title length, where Spotify says aim for under 40 characters and Apple says no more than 45 and fewer than five words. Write to the strictest of each and one list covers all three. The case where it genuinely cannot is a short episode with a lot of quick segments, because clearing Apple two minute chapters and keeping three chapters in a 20 minute episode pulls against Apple own suggestion of no more than six an hour.

The usual reason is that the first timestamp is not 00:00. YouTube ignores the entire set if it is missing, and it does not tell you. It also needs at least three timestamps, in ascending order, with each chapter at least ten seconds long. Break any one of those and you get no chapters at all rather than partial ones, which is why it looks like a mystery instead of an error. Paste your list above and it will name which of the three you broke.

Because the automatic ones only cover their own platform, and only sometimes. Apple generates chapters from iOS 26.2, in English, and not for trailers or episodes under 10 minutes, and only when it could build a transcript first. Spotify generates them in English and says they are not available to all shows yet. Neither writes your YouTube description. The moment you supply your own list, which is also what happens when you edit theirs, you are back to satisfying three different rulebooks with one block of text, and that is the part nothing checks.

Yes, both document it as a supported way to supply them, alongside the RSS tag. Apple lists three routes: the episode description, the podcast:chapters tag in your feed, and chapter metadata inside the audio file. Spotify lists two: timestamps written into the description, and Podlove chapters in the feed. That is why one paragraph ends up being parsed by three different systems, and why a formatting choice that suits one can be invisible to another.

The page marks every finding as one or the other, and never mixes them. YouTube three rules are the only ones with a documented consequence, and that consequence is severe: the whole set disappears. Spotify writes its spacing, ordering, three chapter minimum and plain text rules as requirements but does not say what it does when you break them. Apple spacing, title length, word count and chapters per hour numbers all sit under a heading that says best practices, with no penalty stated anywhere. Restructuring a real episode around an unenforced suggestion is a bad trade, so the page keeps the two apart.

In the video description, one per line, with the time first and the title after it. There is no separate chapters field. Paste the description block from above into the description and save. Chapters normally appear on the progress bar within a few minutes.

ID3 chapters are written inside the MP3 file itself. They work in older apps, but changing a chapter means re-encoding and re-uploading the audio. JSON chapters live in a separate file the app fetches at playback, so you can fix a wrong time months after publishing by editing one file. If your host offers both, JSON is the one that saves you work later.

Close is fine. A chapter mark a second or two early is better than one that lands a second late, because a listener who taps a chapter and hears the tail of the previous topic assumes the marker is broken. Round down when you are unsure.

No. The checking and all five outputs happen in your own browser. There is no account, no limit and no server involved.