podtools / podget

A simple podcast downloader in Go, and an accompanying library.

I needed a command line utility to download and archive my favorite podcasts. I tried various existing utilities, but they were all defective in some way or hard to set up, so I resorted to writing my own. I wanted to be able to run it as a scheduled task on my Synology box, so the easiest thing to do was write it in Go. As a side effect, it was easy to make it multithreaded.

Example:

podget -d ~/TAL -r 30 -v http://feed.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast

The -r 30 means that if a file exists already but is more than 30 days old, we assume they're doing a rerun and download the new version.

The -d ~/TAL argument specifies the destination directory.

The -v says to be verbose and output progress messages.

About podtrac

Increasingly, podcasters have started to use podtrac.com, a commercial service which tracks download statistics. Unfortunately, this breaks easy downloading of podcasts, because the filename always ends up being default.mp3. So, a special argument -podtrac has been added to allow you to specify some way to extract the episode number from the podcast metadata.

For example:

podget -d ~/TAL -r 30 -v -podtrac 'item.description /^(\d+):/' http://feed.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast

The argument syntax is a fieldname, then a space, then a regex in // with a capturing group. The available fields are:

item.author
item.category
item.description
item.duration
item.guid
item.pubDate
item.title
enclosure.url

Install

go install codeberg.org/meta/podtools/cmd/podget@latest

Or clone this repository, cd into the same directory as this README.md file, and then:

go build ./cmd/podget

You should end up with an executable in the current directory.

You can cross-compile in the usual Go way. For example, to build a binary for your Linux Synology box using your Mac,

GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build ./cmd/podget