Bashpodder linux podcasting client
So, juice (formerly known as ipodder) was a bit too gui-only for my tastes, I took a look at bashpodder which is a bash-script based podcast client. Really, this is very much to my liking as it can be scripted to run via cron (or at)… basically, there are three required files from the main site. There is a gui for it, but that’s not necessary…. bashpodder.shell, parse_enclosure.xsl, and bp.conf are required. bp.conf is the main configuration file and you basically enter one feed address per line.
Adding podcast feeds here is very straightforward in a copy-paste sort of way…. and the main bashpodder.shell script can be modified to change the default folder for podcast downloads. (The default is to give a date based foldername, which for most people will probably be ok.)
My main use for it was to download foreign language news audio and I really wanted everything to be in the same folder yesterday, today or tomorrow, so… I made a quick change…
#datadir=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
datadir=podcasts
It is nice that it uses a log to keep track of what it’s seen and what it hasn’t (podcast.log by default.) I like to go back in and sort the downloads by feed after they’re down and was concerned that it would have “amnesia” and download again, but thanks to the logfile, no… all, in all, it’s a nice script to get podcasts for the intermediate – advanced linux user. Not for beginners though.
Also, there’s no way to browse a directory of podcasts and subscribe from within the script… it would be overkill for this, but as a podcasting client, many might expect that kind of feature.