Yet Another Python Podcast Retriever

usage: yappr [-h] [-F CONFIG_FILE] [-c CONFIG_SECTION] [-D DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY]
             [-G GUID_FILE] [-n] [-d] [-g] [-q]
             [FEED [FEED ...]]

yappr: Yet Another Python Podcast Retriever

positional arguments:
  FEED                  Fetch FEEDs instead of feeds from configuration file.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -F CONFIG_FILE, --config-file CONFIG_FILE
                        The configuration file to use.
  -c CONFIG_SECTION, --config-section CONFIG_SECTION
                        The section of the configuration file to use.
  -D DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY, --download-directory DOWNLOAD_DIRECTORY
                        Directory to download podcasts to.
  -G GUID_FILE, --GUID-file GUID_FILE
                        File to track the GUIDs of downloaded podcasts.
  -n, --dry-run         Do not write to local files (same as -d -g).
  -d, --download-skip   Do not download podcasts.
  -g, --GUID-skip       Do not write GUIDs to GUID-file.
  -q, --quiet           Do not print episode titles.

I made this for my own purposes. It's a relatively simple Python 3 podcast retriever that works well with how I listen to podcasts on the devices that I use. At a high level, it:

• Downloads feeds from URLs specified either in a configuration file or on the command line.

• For each of the feeds, it determines from the feed

  • the title,
  • the URL of an image to display for a cover, and
  • the list of episodes.

• For each of the episodes, it determines from the feed:

  • the URL to download the episode from,
  • the Globally Unique Identifier (GUID),
  • when it was published, and
  • the title.

All existing tags in an episode are removed, and then the following ID3v2.3 frames are added:

• The album title (TALB) and the artist (TPE1) are both set to the feed's title.
• The episode title (TIT2) is set with the following format: YYMMDD EpisodeTitle where YYMMDD is the year, month and date that the episode was published and EpisodeTitle was determined from the feed.
• The content type (TCON) is set to 'Podcast'.
• The image of the front cover (APIC) is set to a 300x300 PNG derived from the feed's cover image.
• The length (TLEN) is set to the length of the audio as determined by Mutagen.

The result is saved in the specified download directory with the path: FeedTitle/YYMMDD SanitizedEpisodeTitle where SanitizedEpisodeTitle is the episode title with characters that are invalid for FAT32 volumes changed into number signs ('#').

By doing all this, the podcasts are sorted in order of date published on devices that sort based upon filenames or episode titles and all have consistent information.

A file is kept of all the episode GUIDs that have already been saved so they are not downloaded again.

A design goal was to only use Python 3 modules that were available from Debian Stable repositories. The required Debian packages as of 2020-04-08 are:

• python3-mutagen
• python3-pil
• python3-podcastparser