podracer - a podcast aggregator

Do you listen to podcasts? Do you want to manage these outside of normal web-surfing time? Do you want easy configuration? Then podracer is the software you need.

Podracer was written by Lorenzo Taylor. It is a simple command line tool that has only two plain text configuration files:

$HOME/.podracer/podracer.conf – configure podracer behaviour
$HOME/.podracer/subscriptions – the list of subscriptions

configuration

This file is used to customise podracers download behaviour. With sane defaults, the only settings that I changed were,

poddir – the default root location to save podcasts into

And two other entries indicating where the log files are to be recorded.

subscriptions

Like the name suggests this a plain text file listing the podcasts you subscribe to.
The format is simple:

RSS feed <tab> target directory relative to poddir
As this is a plain text file, where comments can be added by appending “#” to a line, it becomes a useful historical record of podcasts I listen to.

maintenance

To get the most out of podracer, schedule jobs to run during off-peaks times.

# update podcasts (run every day at 03:03) 3 3 * * * podracer

To effortlessly manage podcasts so I don't become overrun with them, I keep only one months worth. This is managed by another crontab entry,

# clean-up old podcasts
@daily find $HOME/music/podcasts/ -name '*.mp3' -type f -mtime +31 -exec rm -v {} \;