Ask HN: Why is it so hard to download podcasts?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • hpodder

    Podcatcher to download podcasts [Haskell] (unmaintained)

  • 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

  • castget

    A simple, command-line based RSS enclosure downloader, primarily intended for automatic, unattended downloading of podcasts.

  • 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

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  • python-scripts

    Misc Python scripts and modules I have made (by EricRa)

  • 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!

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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