SoundCloud RSS Modification

This simple Python script lets you customize the metadata of a SoundCloud RSS feed in order to work with Google Play Podcasts and many other RSS aggregators.

Customizing your feed

The script is set up to overwrite the following metadata:

• primary podcast image (avatar_url)
• email address (itunes:email)
• web master name (webMaster)
• podcast description (description)

It can also replace links, specified as 'before' and 'after' pairs (link_replace).

You can specify these values directly at the start of the script:

# --------- CUSTOMIZATION VARIABLES ---------
feed_url = 'http://feeds.soundcloud.com/playlists/soundcloud:playlists:543996543/sounds.rss'
out_path = 'podcast2.rss'  # New RSS feed will be exported here
avatar_url = 'http://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-000362660322-opta98-original.jpg'
changes = [
    ('itunes:email', 'info@gem-net.net'),
    ('itunes:author', 'C-GEM'),
    ('webMaster', 'Stephen Gaffney'),
    ('description', 'Your audio guide to the world of chemical polymers, brought to you by C-GEM.')
    ]
link_replace = dict([
    ('https://soundcloud.com/yaleuniversity/sets/center-for-genetically-encoded', 'http://gem-net.net/podcast'),
    ('http://www.yale.edu', 'http://gem-net.net/podcast'),
    ])

# --------- END OF CUSTOMIZATION VARIABLES ---------

Python package dependencies

This python script assumes a Python 3 environment, and has only two dependencies: requests (for downloading the text content of your RSS feed), and BeautifulSoup4 (for XML parsing and modification). These dependencies are listed in the requirements.txt file. Install with pip using:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the script

Run the script in bash with the following command, updating the path as appropriate.:

python /path/to/podcast_rss_modify.py

This will download the RSS feed into memory, overwrite variables based on your customization, and create a new file that you can host on your website.