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Introducing podbit: newsboat's podboat improved

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. 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!