First off, what is podcasting? It is a means of distributing audio using RSS. RSS is a kind of syndication that poeple who run news sites and weblogs use to enable you to read their content using a new aggregator, like Liferea. With the current version of RSS, you can embed an "enclosure" in entries in the feed - kind of like an attachment in an email.

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So, with podcasting they embed mp3 files as enclosures. These mp3 files are a range of radio like programmes of a huge range of styles and content - not to metion a huge range of production quality too. And, that is how the files are distributed. You could think of it like time shifting radio - like Tivo time shifts television. The next bit is downloading these files.

Most news aggregators now support enclosures, so you can download them from there, but that is quite labor intensive There are programs avalable that will do it for you automatically. The original program to do this was a script called ipodder. This was some applescript that downloaded the files, and imported them into iTunes, ready to go on your ipod. There are many variants that do more or less that avalable now. Linux is the poor relation at the moment, but the offerings are perfectly usable.

I started by using a perl script called get_enclosures, and then moved on to ipodder. I took the python scripts out of the Apple package and used that. My current choice is a Bash script called podget.

So, here's how to make it work:

• Download podget.sh
• Create a file called ~/.podget/serverlist and put in the URLs of the RSS feeds you want to download from. Add in categories and subcategories beside the URL. These turn into sub directories that podget puts the downloaded files into. Here is what my file looks like:
  

  http://www.itconversations.com/rss/recentWithEnclosures.php IT_Conversations
  http://www.lugradio.org/episodes.rss LUG_Radio
  http://thelinuxbox.org/show/tlbs.rss The_Linux_Box
  http://radio.linuxquestions.org/syndicate/lqpodcast.php LQ_Radio
  http://linux.quicksurf.com/wp-rss2.php Quicksurf
  http://www.infonomicon.org/info.xml Information
  http://www.thelinuxlink.net/tllts/tllts.rss The_Linux_Link_Tech_Show
  http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/audio/directmp3.xml evil-genius
  http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/mobiles/feed/ podcast-network mobile
  http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/gday_world/feed/ podcast-network gday-world

• Test it. In your shell session type podget.sh -l your download directory. This may take some time to download all the mp3's.
• set up a cron job to run podget at a regular interval. I run it twice a day. My entry looks like this:
  

  0 0,12 * * * /home/robert/bin/podget.sh -l /home/robert/Downloads/mp3

• Leave it overnight to cook
• When you come back you can then transfer the downloaded mp3's to your favorite mp3 player.

There are directories of podcasts available on teh internet. The one I look at is at ipodder.org. There are some linux related podcasts too. My serverlist has some of them included.