Your Obsidian vault is where good ideas go to wait. Meeting notes, clipped articles, research drafts, that long write-up you promised yourself you’d reread before the next planning session. They’re all there, carefully linked. You just don’t get much time to sit down and read them.
Today we’re launching noctua for Obsidian, a community plugin that sends any note from your vault straight to your noctua podcast feed. Pick a note, send it, and it becomes an edition you can listen to on your next walk.
Open the noctua plugin in Obsidian →
What it does
The plugin adds a few ways to send a note, so you can use whichever fits how you work:
- Send the whole note. Use the ribbon icon, the command palette (Send note to your podcast feed), or right-click any note in the file explorer and choose Send to Noctua.
- Send just a selection. Highlight a passage and run Send selection to your podcast feed. It’s useful when you only want one section of a long note.
- Watch it progress. A notice in Obsidian shows how the conversion is going and tells you when the edition is in your feed.
- Avoid sending a note twice. After a successful send, the plugin can add
noctua_idandnoctua_urlto the note’s frontmatter. If you try to send it again, the plugin reminds you it’s already in your feed.
noctua picks a title for you. It uses the title in the note’s frontmatter if there is one, then the first heading, then the file name. Frontmatter is removed before sending, so you won’t hear your YAML read aloud.
It works on both desktop and mobile.
Setting it up
This takes about two minutes, and you only do it once.
Step 1: Install the plugin
Click this link on a device where Obsidian is installed:
obsidian://show-plugin?id=noctua
Obsidian opens the plugin page. Click Install, then Enable. You can also search for “noctua” under Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
Step 2: Create an API key
Sign in at cast.noctua.uno and open Settings → API keys. Create a key and give it a label like “Obsidian”. Copy it straight away, because it’s only shown once.
Step 3: Connect Obsidian to noctua
In Obsidian, go to Settings → Noctua and paste in your key. Click Test connection. You should see a confirmation along with the number of credits you have left.
Step 4: Send a note
Open any note and click the noctua icon in the ribbon. A minute or two later, the edition shows up in your podcast app.
A few practical notes
- Each send uses one credit, the same as any other noctua reading. If a conversion fails, you get the credit back automatically.
- Nothing happens in the background. The plugin only contacts noctua when you send something, and it collects no analytics.
- What gets sent: the note’s content (or the text you selected), its title, and an
obsidian://link back to the source note. That link is stored with the edition so you can find the original later. It doesn’t appear in your RSS feed or on public share pages. - Your API key stays private. On Obsidian 1.11.4 and later it’s kept in Obsidian’s secret storage. On older versions it’s saved in the plugin’s settings file, which lives inside your vault, so bear that in mind if you sync or back up your vault.
- Content limit is 500,000 characters per send, which covers even the longest notes.
Where this fits
noctua already takes your newsletters by email, links from your browser, and handoffs from your AI assistant. Obsidian was an obvious next step, since it’s where many of us keep the things we most want to take in and least often get around to.
Write in your vault, then listen to it wherever you are.
— The noctua team