Fastcasts

A simple RSS downloader for podcasts, designed to load the files onto my mp3 player.

Features

• configure rss feeds via TOML
• converts all formats to mp3 while downloading (this is what fits on my mp3 player)
• converts all formats to 2x speed while downloading (the player has limited speed control)

Installation

Install Python dependencies (pip install the following)

• tomli a minimal TOML parser (TODO: migrate to python 3.11 tomllib)
• tqdm for pretty CLI progress bars
• requests URL downloader
• podcastparser to parse RSS feeds
• filename_sanitizer to convert titles to permissible path fragments

Install other dependencies (see your package manager):

• ffmpeg to convert to mp3 and speed up the files

Optional:

• Make the script executable and add it to your path so you can sync podcasts from anywhere.

Configuration

List RSS feeds:

• Put somewhere a toml file containing a list of categories and within the categories various podcasts:

  [economics]
  
  econtalk              = "https://feeds.simplecast.com/wgl4xEgL"
  
  [philosophy]
  
  philosopher-and-news  = "https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1577503.rss"
  
  [misc]
  
  not-related           = "https://notrelated.xyz/rss"
  ezra-klein            = "https://feeds.simplecast.com/82FI35Px"

  In the example all the URLs are at depth 3 (there is a category key and a podcast title key and then the URL), but this is not a hard requirement. The script will create folders mirroring the TOML table (dictionary) structure and I guess it can go arbitrarily deep.

• It's just a TOML file so you can for example comment out podcasts you don't want to sync every single time (for example if they are no lonher expected to be updated or you're just not listening to them at the moment)

My example is included in the repo.

Configure the script:

• Point the RSS_LIST variable at your toml file
• Point the ROOT_PATH variable at where you want the podcast folders to be created.

Usage

Just call the script and wait for it to download/convert all of the episodes.

Let me know if any issues.

Development

TODO:

• add better error handling so that if something goes wrong with (1) downloading or (2) ffmpeg or (3) OS I can tell which, and have useful information such as the ffmpeg error, the url, the path, etc.

• make the filename generation more configurable (not always "date-title.mp3")

• make the speedup and mp3-formatting configurable? or at least optional? so that you can use without ffmpeg if you want a simple podcast downloader