May 07, 2005

Curious George: iPodder Is there a way to use iPodder (or any other application) to automatically download mp3's, given an RSS feed of an ordinary mp3 blog? iPodder, as far as I can tell, will do this only if the blog entry is a podcast. I'm not sure what that means exactly, and after spending some time with google, I've decided that neither do most people on the internet. I hope some monkey is more enlightened than I.
posted by smallish bear 19 years ago
  • How about you all also tell us your favorite podcasts. As per usual with the internets, there is so much crap to sort through you can get overwhelmed. Any suggestions?
  • I'm not sure if this is close enough to be helpful, but at this link they explain how to use a command-line utility to download a web page's linked MP3s in batch. It doesn't involve RSS, but does that matter?
  • Wheeeel... I tried iPodder and gave up a few months ago. But I did find some good stuff through Webjay first. Now that school's out and I'm in need of tuneage, I might try again.
  • Unfortunately, no. I'm not exactly into podcasts, although to be fair I haven't tried them yet. I was hoping that, since podcasts are blog entries that contain mp3s, and mp3 blogs have blog entries that contain mp3s, I could use Doppler Radio or iPodder to automatically download the daily offerings from an mp3 blog (or 2, or 87) while I am at work, so I can put them on my ipod that night for the next days commute. These 2 applications do just that for podcasts, but I cannot make it work for mp3 blogs. While I'm not a good source for podcasts in particular, I can vigorously recommend SomaFM for most of your internet radio needs. Also, here is an interesting blog post about an RSS feed someone made for all those free amazon mp3s that were the subject of a recent mofi thread. Here is a link to some software that'll record streaming radio stations and create an RSS feed that you can pipe into your iPodder or whatever you use. I found those 2 on bb when searching for a solution to my problem.
  • I'm not sure if this is close enough to be helpful, but at this link they explain how to use a command-line utility to download a web page's linked MP3s in batch. It doesn't involve RSS, but does that matter? That is awesome. And with a cron job (runs command x every y seconds, or something like that) it does exactly what I need. Or would, if I had linux installed. I used to be a linux geek. I could probably pull this off. But I'll hold out a little longer for a windows solution. Monkeys- look at this thread. That is the beast we are dealing with. We need a tool like this. Personally, I think the easiest way to do it would be to learn how podcast RSS feeds are structured, and write a script to scrape mp3 links off your favorite blogs and construct a feed like that. That feed can be processed by something like Doppler Radio, which will do all the downloading for you. I know you can write scripts to scrape sites and write RSS feeds for them: kottke does it here.
  • -.. ..- .-. ..-. / .-- .- - -.-. .... / -- . / -... .-.. --- --. / .- -... --- ..- - / -- -.-- / .. .--. --- -.. .-.-.- / .-.. .- -- . .-.-.-
  • smallish bear, I'm sure you can schedule it with Windows' "Scheduled Tasks" too. Throw your command line(s) into a .bat file and associate the .bat file with a schedule. I realize this isn't as sexy as something that involves RSS, scripting, and free beer, but it should do the trick.
  • Well, I was going for easy, not sexy. It seemed like a good idea last night though. This morning, searching that page for the word "windows" seemed like a good idea, and I found a link to a package of windows ports of neat unix utilities, including wget. Now you're right, I can set up a scheduled task in windows. When I get done with all this, I will post a comprehensive description of what needs to be done here.
  • Cygwin is another package of unix utils for Windows. Includes wget, emacs, X, perl, python, ... --Pat
  • One way to see a lot of mp3s from many different audio blogs is to use an mp3 aggregator site. You will still have to down load them one at a time, but you will be able to see all the mp3s from many blogs all at once. Check these out; http://elbo.ws/ http://www.webnymph.com/ http://www.mp3blogs.org/ Some of them have RSS Feeds. So you don't really have to go to the site if you don't want to. And finally some mp3 blogs, like mine (BackBeat) and the Tunning blog for example, take the RSS feed of the aggregators and post it. So you can go to our blogs and see mp3s from many other blogs.