/Ichapod

Ichapod is a GPLv3 BASH shell script designed to download and process podcasts in a headless environment. It handles filenames, ID3 tags, and even cover art.

Primary LanguageShellGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

Ichapod by Patrick Simonds (divinitycycle@gmail.com)
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What is it?
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This is a BASH shell script intended to be run as a Cron job, or by hand as needed.
Quite simply, Ichapod downloads files from podcast feeds and formats them nicely.
By "nicely", I mean it outputs files with all the ID3 tags filled in, including
cover art (if supplied). The filenames are also very human readable, making it easier
to archive & organize podcasts.

Setup & Use
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Pre-requisites for this script are eyeD3, xsltproc, wget, and mp3gain.
If you're running Ubuntu, you should be able to just apt-get all of those.
Like any other script, just chmod a+x to give it executable rights.
The script has a few settings in it, plus you need to give it a text file
containing the podcasts you want to download. The example (podcasts.txt) is included.

Settings
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destinationfolder: This is the root folder Ichapod will move all the downloaded files to.
Sub-directories are created for each feed.

podcastlist: The address in the filesystem where your podcasts.txt is located.
(enclose in double-quotes if the path contains spaces)

downloadlog: The address in the filesystem where you want Ichapod to keep an ongoing
record of what files have been downloaded. This is checked against to prevent duplicates.
(enclose in double-quotes if the path contains spaces)

podcasts.txt: This file should contain a list of the feeds you want Ichapod to download from.
The format is very simple, with one line per feed. You can use none, one, or two labels.
With no labels specified, Ichapod will attempt to parse the feed name out of the RSS.
With one label specified, Ichapod will ignore the feed's Channel Name and instead use what you
specify for the Artist, Album Artist, and Album tags. Depending on the feed, this may work fine.
With two labels specified, the first label is used for the Artist and AlbumArtist tags, and the 
second is used as the Album tag. This is my preferred method of use.
Note: DO NOT delete the last line, for some reason it gets ignored.

History
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The inspiration was simple: I wanted to listen to podcasts, but wanted to use my 
existing nice media player solutions to do it. I use things like XBMC and SongBird
on the computer, and UberMusic & PlayerPro on Android. All of them are really nice, 
but look and act kinda lame if you try to listen to the files from most podcasts.
The information about each episode is there, in the feed, but not in the file.

I was initially going to just use G-Podder, but that requires a full desktop be
running. My headless server doesn't have any of that stuff installed, and really
you shouldn't NEED that stuff just to do something as basic as get podcasts. This
lead to a bunch of Googling and Bashpodder, which I quickly found insufficient.
Thus, I began chugging away on my own solution. 
This script was written almost entirely within Notepad++ and tested on a headless
machine running Ubuntu Server 11.10.