Does anyone out there have a favorite Linux program for downloading podcasts? I've been using Chess Griffin's mashpodder but (a) it's now abandonware, and (b) due to the way it identifies files, it doesn't work with modern podcasts where the base name of the file is always "media.mp3" and the earlier parts of the URL change. As such, I'm looking for a replacement, preferably something that I can run as a cron job so that it fires every day without any intervention on my part and where the configuration lives in a file that I can edit with a simple text editor like vim. I'm considering rolling my own in Python just to get more experience with that language, but I thought I'd see if any Soylentils had suggestions for me to check out before I went to the effort of doing that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by romlok on Thursday July 26 2018, @11:17PM
I've been using gPodder as my desktop podcast client for many years. It's primarily a Gtk app but does include a command-line interface, though I don't know how extensive the CLI functionality is.
And, if you do decide to roll something yourself, gPodder split out their podcastparser [github.com] library for other Python projects to use. You might think that podcast feeds should be pretty simple to parse, but web developers tend to have a "special" relationship with standards-compliance, so using an established parsing library could save you a bunch of headaches.