PodCatch

From 1ste Gimnechiske Wiki

Background

Have you heard of PodCasting? PodCasting is a service for sharing music or similar to iPods and other mp3 players as a legal service. I heard a radio station (NRK) advertice about their PodCast services, and I checked it out by curiousity. I found out that it used RSS feeds for the software or the iPod to know what to access, and where to find it.

“RSS feed” I thought, opened Mozilla Thunderbird, and subscribed to it as a blogg. I realized quickly that this worked but was very worky for me. It demanded loads of effort from me to download the files, and there was no way for me to recognize what was interesting and what was not. So I loaded a copy of the feed into a text window to see how it looked, and the idea of parsing it to a script or a program in order to download the files more easily came to me. Now the though was “how to do this quickly”. I mentioned the idea to my brother, and we discussed abit back and forth. We tossed in ideas like Shell Scripting, PERL, Python and Java. We decided on Python, and since I’ve never programmed in Python my brother was pointed out to be head developer on the project.

After 2-3 days of writing, checking libraries and testing, the first version of PodCatch was ready. A few obvious bugs was found and removed at once. Now we sat PodCatch to download 1154 mp3’s from NRK’s Urørt project, and things seems to work. Now maybe you would be interested in the program? It’s available here now, and if the need and interest are there, new versions might be made available through these pages.

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