The other day I had an idea of how I could get podcast-appropriate MP3 files from my PC into my smartphone's podcast player. I was planning to build the required software myself, but I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to find that someone had already created and made freely available the necessary tools. After some quick configuration and testing I now have a new tool in my weekly workflow to make my life easier.I could have copied my MP3s onto my phone, and listened through a media application, but using a podcast player brings the benefits of:
- automatically downloading new audio files
- storing the position of listened files
- automatically deleting completed files
The tool I found was a python script called genRSS from Similar Sounds. This can recurse through a folder to create an RSS file of the media files it finds. Then you can run a simple python web server to serve that RSS file and the media files to whatever podcast player you want.
The script is well-written, well-documented, and works perfectly. And now my audio files are set free from the confines of my PC. And when more audio files come along, I can run the script and webserver again, and tell my podcast player to update that feed.
For an alternative, simpler python script, see Stuff About Code.