grabpod

and friends

Warning: Some of these programs remove and/or alter files. I make no representation that they won't erase all of your data and destroy your computer.

Most of the CLI programs for downloading podcasts that I've found are too full-service for my tastes. Instead of learning how to tell a particular program to download 3 episodes of Talk of the Nation and only 1 episode of The History of Rome, but rename according to so-and-so method, I'd like to say

grabpod -n 3 rome

or

grabpod -n 1 'http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=5'

and write my own scripts to arrange the files where I'd like them. If this sounds like you, these elemental tools may be what you're looking for.

grabpod

Sample .grabpodrc

allbut

deletes everything in a directory except what's in a list of things to preserve.

chop

chops the first N minutes off the front of an mp3

drivetime_podcasts

shows roughly how I use these scripts to download and arrange my podcasts

cut_off_args

takes the ?one=two&three=four off the end of urls. This is necessary to download many of the podcasts at NPR.

These are all ksh and sed scripts. They depend on having various things you can find in your unix distribution's package manager like xml2, mp3splt, wget, and srm.

Please tell me about any suggestions or bugs.

older versions