Podcast and Spoken-Word Audio

How to add chapters to a podcast episode (and override the automatic ones)

By StudioRescue Editorial

Published October 12, 2026

Chapters are the one podcast feature where the instructions you find are almost always written by somebody’s hosting company, about their own dashboard. That is fine until your chapters do not appear, or appear in one app and not another, or appear with titles you did not write. At that point you need to know what is actually happening underneath, because the fix depends on which mechanism your listeners are getting.

This page covers the three mechanisms, which platforms read which, the editing step that makes the timestamps trivial to produce, and what to do about the chapters the platforms now write on your behalf.

Three different things are called chapters

Start here, because every confusing symptom downstream comes from these being mixed up.

Apple Podcasts documents all three as valid ways to supply chapters: in the episode description, through your hosting provider and RSS feed with the <podcast:chapters> tag, or by specifying chapters in the header of an MP4 file or in the ID3 tags of an MP3 or AAC file.

Spotify documents a different set. Its creator article describes manual chapters as timestamps and titles written in the episode description, and says shows hosted elsewhere can instead use Podlove chapters in their RSS feed. It does not mention embedded ID3 chapters or the <podcast:chapters> tag at all.

Mark the chapter points while you are still editing

The slow way to get timestamps is to finish the episode, play it back, and write down times as they go past. The fast way is to drop a marker every time you finish a segment, while you still have the session open and still remember what the segment was about.

REAPER’s own Quick Start guide lists the shortcuts you need:

If you prefer to work in blocks rather than points, Shift+R creates a region over a time selection. REAPER also has a Region/Marker Manager, documented as section 9.9 of the REAPER User Guide, if you want to work with the whole list in one place.

Write the list

The description format is the same list everywhere, and it is unforgiving in one specific way: the first entry has to be zero.

• One line per chapter, each a timestamp followed by a title.
• The first timestamp is 00:00:00. Apple states that chapters should start at 00:00:00, and YouTube states that the first listed timestamp must start at 00:00.
• Ascending order. Both Apple and YouTube expect the list to run forward.
• Titles that say what the segment is. “Intro” is a wasted chapter. “Why the mic sounded worse after the upgrade” is a reason to tap.

A finished list looks like this, and it goes straight into the episode description:

Four chapters across a forty minute episode is a reasonable shape. Note that each one is a real segment rather than a beat in the conversation, and that the first is at zero.

Apple’s published guidelines, as numbers

Apple publishes specific guidance for chapters, which is worth following because it is also roughly what makes chapters useful to a listener:

• Include at least three chapters.
• Provide chapters if the episode runs longer than 10 minutes.
• Keep chapters no shorter than two minutes.
• Limit chapters to no more than six per hour.

Treat these as a starting shape rather than a rule of physics. A tightly segmented news show might reasonably break the six-per-hour guidance; a rambling two-hour conversation with four chapters is not serving anyone. But if your instinct is to add a chapter every ninety seconds, Apple’s guidance is telling you something true, which is that chapters are a table of contents and not a transcript.

Apple now writes chapters for you, and how to take them back

This is the part that is new, and it is the reason a lot of people are suddenly looking this up. Apple Podcasts generates chapters when you have not provided any, and marks them with an Automatically Created label. Per Apple’s creator documentation, this applies to full and bonus episodes in English, starting with iOS 26.2. Trailers and episodes under 10 minutes do not get them, and if Apple cannot generate a transcript for the episode it will not generate chapters either.

Three things follow from that.

1. Supplying your own wins. Apple says chapters you provide will always be displayed in Apple Podcasts, including on episodes that are already published. You do not need to re-upload audio to fix a back catalogue of automatic chapters.
2. You can start from theirs. Apple Podcasts Connect lets you download the automatically created list as a TXT file, edit it, and put the corrected version in your episode description. For a long back catalogue that is far less work than writing every list from scratch.
3. You can switch them off. For a whole show, deselect the option to display chapters created by Apple Podcasts on the Availability tab in Apple Podcasts Connect. For a single episode, open the episode’s Audio section, then Settings, then Edit, and choose the chapter setting there.

Spotify works differently

Spotify also generates chapters, but by a different route and with different limits. Its creator documentation says Spotify generates a transcript and selects the chapter titles and start points, that creators can edit these or turn them off for an episode or a whole show, that automatic chapters are currently only generated in English, and that they are not available to all shows yet.

For your own chapters, Spotify documents two routes: timestamps and titles written in the episode description, or, for shows hosted elsewhere, Podlove chapters in the RSS feed. Spotify states that manual chapters take priority, so if you add them they appear instead of the automatic ones.

The headline for a working podcaster is simple. Writing the list in your description covers both Apple and Spotify, and it is the only single action that does.

The two richer routes, and when they are worth it

Chapters in the RSS feed

The <podcast:chapters> tag is part of the podcast namespace. It goes in an episode’s <item>, appears once per episode, and takes two required attributes: a url pointing at an external chapters file and a type giving its MIME type, with application/json+chapters as the preferred value. The namespace documentation lists dozens of podcast apps and hosting tools that support it.

The real argument for this route is that the chapters live in a separate file rather than inside the audio. You can change them after publishing without touching the audio file, and a browser or a web player can read them. The practical catch is that you generally need a host that produces the tag for you, because hand-writing the JSON file and hosting it yourself is a lot of work for a weekly show.

Chapters inside the audio file

Embedded chapters in an MP3 are ID3 frames. They are defined by the ID3v2 Chapter Frame Addendum, which adds a CHAP frame for each chapter and a CTOC frame for the table of contents. Each CHAP frame carries a start and end time in milliseconds from the beginning of the file, optional byte offsets, and optional sub-frames for the chapter name and description. It is worth knowing that this document is an informal standard, dated December 2005, rather than a formal part of ID3v2, which is a large part of why support for it varies so much between apps.

You do not write these by hand. They come from a tagging tool, or from your host: Transistor, for example, documents that it captures chapter data from an uploaded audio file and also offers a manual chapter editor that writes chapters into the file for you. Check your own host’s documentation before doing the work, because hosts differ on this more than on almost anything else.

REAPER can write ID3 metadata at render time, which the user guide covers in section 4.4, Working With Metadata, and which is walked through in podcast export settings in REAPER. Treat chapter frames as a separate question from the title, artist and artwork fields covered there, and confirm what your own chain produces rather than assuming.

If you also post the episode to YouTube

YouTube builds chapters from description timestamps, with its own published requirements: the first timestamp must start at 00:00, there must be at least three timestamps listed in ascending order, and the minimum chapter length is 10 seconds. The useful part is that the same list you wrote for Apple and Spotify will generally satisfy YouTube too, so this is one list and three destinations rather than three jobs.

What chapters will not do

Chapters are navigation. They are not a growth strategy, and they do not touch the audio.

• They will not make a badly edited episode listenable. A chapter is a doorway into the same room. If the room has a problem, see how to edit out filler words and breaths in REAPER first.
• They will not look identical everywhere. Different apps read different mechanisms, render them differently, and some show none at all.
• They will not survive a re-edit. Timestamps are tied to the exact file you measured them from.
• They may not survive dynamic ad insertion unchanged. Transistor, for instance, documents that chapter times are adjusted to match the current campaign when dynamic ad insertion is in use. If your host inserts ads, check what happens to your times.
• They are not the same as audiobook chapters. An audiobook is normally one file per chapter rather than one file with chapter markers in it, which is a different delivery model entirely. See how to meet ACX audiobook specs in REAPER if that is the job you are actually doing.

If the chapters are not showing up

Work down this list before assuming the platform is broken.

1. Your first timestamp is not zero. This is the single most common cause. Apple expects chapters to start at 00:00:00 and YouTube requires the first timestamp to be 00:00.
2. There are fewer than three. Apple’s guidance asks for at least three, and YouTube requires at least three.
3. You are waiting on automatic chapters that are never coming. Apple does not generate chapters for trailers or for episodes under 10 minutes, and it does not generate them at all if it cannot produce a transcript. On a short episode, supplying your own is the only route.
4. The list is out of order. Both platforms expect ascending times, and a single out-of-order line can invalidate the set.
5. You supplied them one way and are checking an app that reads another. An embedded ID3 chapter list will not appear in a player that only reads your description text. Check in the app you actually targeted.
6. The feed has not refreshed. RSS-side changes propagate on the platform’s schedule, not yours.
7. What you are looking at is the automatic set. Apple labels its own as Automatically Created. If you see that label, yours did not land.