podcast_downloading_simplified MP3 XML Music

December 8, 2007 5:36 PM

MuFeature request: simplifying mp3 playlist/XML downloading. Tips?

I don't have /can't have itunes et.al installed, and use the file explorer to add tracks to a Creative player...

posted by acro to MetaFilter Music at 5:36 PM (5 comments total)

Maybe google for "podcatchers" and you'll find a ton of apps aside from iTunes that will automatically download the files and do stuff with them.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:36 PM on December 8, 2007

I downloaded Miro mathowie, and it works well, but would you consider some kind of dhtml gadget showing the mp3 links (for podcast feeds) so that FF users of DownthemAll (or wget, etc.) could grab mp3s?
posted by acro at 11:02 PM on December 8, 2007

Um... I don't see what the difficulty is... in the HTML version, the mp3 links are right there on the page -- it's in the little disk icon. You could whip up a curl app in 5 minutes parse out the "file" attribute in the "flashvars" param tag.

The RSS feeds are even easier -- just grab the url attribute in the enclosure tag and you're done... This is so trivial that I'm skeptical no one has written it and that none of these or these apps could manage it; I know I could do it in Lisp in about 15 minutes and I imagine it could be done even in a shell script or an interped PHP/Perl/whatever script in even less time
posted by spiderwire at 3:03 AM on December 9, 2007

Or, if you must, you could download the RSS script and do two find/replaces:
1. <enclosure= replaces with <a href=
2. type="audio/mpeg"/> replaces with type="audio/mpeg"/>mp3 file!</a>
Voila! Now every enclosed file in the RSS feed is a link and you can feed the resulting file through wget or whatever. You could automate this in any one of a million-bajillion ways, but again, I doubt that any of the podcatchers don't do something like this.
posted by spiderwire at 3:12 AM on December 9, 2007

Sorry, that first one should be <enclosure url=
posted by spiderwire at 3:14 AM on December 9, 2007