castget VS python-scripts

Many people have given their "why," but I'll give another "how".

castget¹ is a simple tool that does exactly what you want, just add a feed URL and it pulls all the episodes. It has a nice catchup mode so you can add feeds that you've listened to elsewhere without pulling all the old episodes too. hpodder² is another tool I've used in the past, but I can't remember why I switched.

Depending on how much you like cobbling together your own solution html-xml-utils³ makes it incredibly easy to script a solution. For example, "curl feed | hxselect -c -s '\n' 'enclosure::attr(url)'" would list just the URLs. feedparser⁴ is a battle tested solution for processing feeds if you'd prefer a proper solution over a hacky shell script.

¹ https://castget.johndal.com/

² https://github.com/jgoerzen/hpodder/

³ https://www.w3.org/Tools/HTML-XML-utils/

⁴ https://github.com/kurtmckee/feedparser

Personally, I use castget to save everything locally and then sync it to my phone and play the files with AudioAnchor, but my methods are rather eccentric.

Something about the substack migration created a hiccup with the RSS feed that caused castget to download a bunch of duplicate files with slightly different names. I can sort them out by timestamp, but some of them aren't duplicates... :-/

I think that help() is great too, but I'm not a fan of the interactive nature of it. I'd rather the raw text just get dumped to a file so I can browse it more easily, so I do something like this[1] to print the output of both the help() and dir() functions on any Python object to a text file in the current directory. That way it's a bit easier to search through if it's a lot of info.

[1] https://github.com/EricRa/python-scripts/blob/main/modules/p...

Despite there being many good solutions and suggestions from people here, I ended up creating my own podcast downloader as a learning experience:

https://github.com/EricRa/python-scripts/tree/main/modules/p...

Appreciate everyone's suggestions and time!