How to Listen to Substack Newsletters

Only the ones where the author recorded a narration. A growing number of Substack writers record themselves reading each post, and Substack added built-in audio support for that in 2023. When a post has audio, a play button appears below the title, and you can listen right in the browser or the Substack app. The quality is whatever the author's microphone produces. It is a human reading, not TTS.

For the vast majority of Substack posts, there is no audio. The post is text, and Substack gives you no button to listen to it. That is the gap this guide covers.

The workflow is the same as listening to any web article. Here it is step by step:

1. Open the post in Safari. On iPhone or Mac, open the Substack post in Safari rather than the Substack app. If it is a subscriber-only post, make sure you are logged in.
2. Activate Reader view. Tap or click the Reader button in the Safari address bar. Reader view strips the Substack branding, the subscribe prompts, the comment section, and everything that is not the article text. You get a clean page with just the headline and the body.
3. Export as PDF. On Mac, go to File then Export as PDF. On iPhone, tap the share button, find Print, pinch outward on the preview to open it as a PDF, then save to Files or share directly to LoudReader.
4. Import into LoudReader. Open LoudReader, import the PDF, and press play. The app reads the newsletter aloud with natural neural voices.

After you do this once, the whole sequence takes about 30 seconds. If you read several newsletters in a session, you can export them all as PDFs first, then import them into LoudReader as a batch. Listening to PDFs on iPhone covers the import side in more detail.

The approach works, and it has real tradeoffs worth knowing before you commit to it:

• Manual export. There is no "send this Substack to LoudReader" button. Every post needs a manual export. This takes seconds per post, and if you read ten newsletters a day, you will spend a few minutes a day exporting. Whether that friction is acceptable depends on how much you value listening over reading.
• Paywall honesty. If a post is behind a paywall and you are not subscribed, the PDF captures the paywall message (usually a "subscribe to read" prompt with a blurred preview). The text behind the paywall does not export. You must be an active subscriber and logged in to capture the full article.
• No embedded content. Substack posts often include embedded tweets, YouTube videos, charts, and Substack Notes. None of these produce audio. The TTS voice reads the surrounding text and skips the embeds. If the author describes what is in the embed, you hear the description. If not, you miss that content entirely.
• No comment section. Reader view strips the comments, which is usually what you want for listening, but some Substack communities have comment threads that are worth reading separately.

You can, but the queue is a folder of PDFs, not a live feed. Here is a practical workflow that several LoudReader users have settled on:

1. When a newsletter arrives in your inbox, open it in Safari and export it as a PDF immediately. Save it to a dedicated folder (iCloud Drive, or a local folder on your Mac).
2. At the end of the day or week, open LoudReader and import the PDFs you collected. The app lists them in its library, and you can play them in any order.
3. Delete each PDF from LoudReader when you are done listening, or keep them as a reference archive.

This is not as slick as a podcast app that auto-downloads new episodes. It is a manual queue. But it works, it is entirely offline once the PDFs are imported, and it keeps your reading private. LoudReader is fully on-device and private, your library never leaves your device, so your newsletter queue is not mined or profiled by a cloud service.

For a broader look at turning web content into audio, see how to turn any book into an audiobook. The same principles apply to newsletters.