I recently got one of my projects to a practically finished state, and thought that people might appreciate knowing about it. Lots of people use newsboat as an RSS reader. By default, it comes shipped with "podboat", which is a very bare-bones podcast downloader. I used it for a long time, before some minor annoyances began to get to me, including:
- Lack of ability to auto-download all queued podcasts in bulk
- Need to keep enqueueing and dequeueing podcasts constantly
- No play queue, even using an external player like mpv
- Lack of ability to reload queue file while running, leading to constantly irritating situations of not being able to download new episodes
So, I sat down and planned out my own version. The result is Podbit (https://github.com/ethanv2/podbit). It is written in Go and has an ncurses TUI. Currently implemented features:
- Hot-reloads the queue file and merges state in-memory with on-disk
- Can download over HTTP or using an external tool (such as youtube-dl)
- Downloads efficiently in parallel and in bulk
- Creates a play queue which loads and plays audio using an mpv
- Sort enqueued episodes into podcasts via configurable regex
Details on how to use are in the GitHub wiki. Enjoy!
Almost forgot: it's in the AUR under "podbit" - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/podbit. I package it, so it's basically always up-to-date.