castget

A command-line podcast downloader

castget is a simple, command-line based RSS enclosure downloader. It is primarily intended for automatic, unattended downloading of podcasts.

castget was written by Marius L. Jøhndal and is maintained by Marius L. Jøhndal and Jick Nan.

News

• 16 February 2007: Version 0.9.6 is available. This release adds an option to restrict actions to the most recent enclosure available from a channel, an option to restrict actions to new channels only, and an option to resume any downloads that have been aborted. The release also fixes problems with ID3 tags not being written in some cases and problems with linking with the id3lib library.
• 8 July 2006: Version 0.9.5 is available. This is another bug-fix only release. The release fixes a serious problem with the handling of temporary files, adds further validation of the configuration file and includes updates to the documentation.
• 10 June 2006: Version 0.9.4 is available. This is a bug-fix release that addresses several minor issues reported by users and adds a work-around for RSS feeds that use undeclared HTML entities.

Features

• Simple configuration.
• Per-channel tagging of downloaded MP3 files using ID3v2.
• Per-channel download directories.
• Supports all RSS versions (to the extent this is possible) and Media RSS.

Download

There is currently no stable version of castget. Instead you can download the latest development tarball castget-0.9.6.tar.gz or browse the release directory.

To build castget you will need

• glib2
• libxml2
• libcurl

and optionally

• id3lib

castget has only been tested on Linux, but should work on other UNIX-like systems.

Configuration

castget is configured using a configuration file called .castgetrc located in the user's home directory.

The format of this configuration file is very simple: There should be one section for each RSS feed that you want to subscribe to, for example:

[df]
url=http://digitalflotsam.org/rss.xml
spool=/home/joe/podcasts

Each such section is referred to as a channel. For each channel you may adjust individual settings by adding key-value-pairs like the the two url and spool settings above.

You may also add a global section specifying overridable defaults that affect all channels:

[*]
id3contenttype=Podcast

The source distribution includes a sample configuration file demonstrating all supported settings. Please see the manual pages castget(1) and castgetrc(5) for further information.

Screenshots

The mandatory screenshot:

Development

Development of castget takes place on Savannah.