Running isn’t the most enjoyable activity, but it’s great for burning calories. One of the best ways to cope is by listening to podcasts. Podcast apps are generally great and provide innovative features — like speeding up the playback (to get through the content quicker). Switching between podcasts and audiobooks becomes jarring after expecting many of the same behaviors, so I spent a weekend throwing together a quick application to create podcasts from local files.
It’s pushed to github (as open-source) and can be used for turning local mp3’s into deliverable podcast episodes. Use it to produce a podcast or publish audio files to the web.
Filecasted
It’s a simple app — it takes a list of files and creates an RSS (.xml) file. The RSS file can be hosted on something like AWS for general delivery. I threw it together using poetry/python, and development is started by:
pip install poetrypoetry installpoetry shell— thefilecastcommand is now available.
$ filecast --help
Usage: filecast [OPTIONS] INPUT
Create a podcast file from INPUT.
INPUT can be a playlist (`.m3u`), stdin (`-`), a directory or a collection
of audio files. Playlists and stdin should be a simple text document with
a list of files to add.
Options:
--version
-v, --verbose
-f, --force Force the output to an existing file.
--audio-extensions EXT Comma separated list of processable extensions.
[default: .mp3,.mp4,.wav]
-a, --append Append INPUT to the output file.
-o, --output PATH
-n, --dry-run Run as normally, but don't make any permanent
changes
--help Show this message and exit.
It’s still a bit buggy. For instance, the album art doesn’t show correctly in the podcasts app I use, and some of the audio files downloaded strangely (but I don’t believe that was related to my code).
Also, there is a lot of room for improvement. It would be nice to manage some of the metadata and update/change feeds as needed. Or maybe support transcoding/speeding files up/adding/editing/splicing the audio files… Or adding support for awscli and delivering both the “episodes” and the RSS file to their space on the internet.
The sad ending
Despite the bugs, Filecasted worked for me in the limited capacity that I needed it to. I was able to create podcasts from local files, publish to AWS and then listen to it with my podcast app. Since I last used it though, I switched to Pocket Casts, which has a feature to play local files without the intermediate steps needed to host and download.
So the bugs will likely remain and I’ll just keep the joyful memory of building and using my creation 😢.